La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile's Frontier Territory

Abstract

In his study of Chile's southern frontier, Thomas Klubock weaves together story lines about forest transformation and rural social relations. He tracks the emergence of forestry science, the assertion of sovereignty claims and the litigation of land rights, the relationships between a modernizing state and indigenous citizens, shifting labor regimes and new forms of exploitation, and the trajectories of environmentalist discourse. La Frontera brings a great deal to the table; individual chapters provide enough fodder for a week's seminar meeting. Undergraduates might feel overwhelmed, but as that list of themes indicates, they will find in the book many crucial features of the long twentieth century in Latin America as a whole. With Klubock's telling, we have new ways to understand how Chile experienced those processes.The reach of Mapuche groups' control and the frailty of the state's presence defined the “frontier” of Klubock's title more than international boundaries. It occupies a large chunk of southern Chile, without reaching all the way to the country's tip. Klubock treats the entire region, choosing to synthesize broad trends rather than write a case study of a single community. The forests here represent a third of the world's temperate forest, a figure all the more impressive after reading Klubock describe its deforestation as wanton, wholesale, rampant, wasteful, and indiscriminate. In the wake of some of these waves of ruination came reforestation, albeit with plantations of Monterey pine. From southern Chile's ecological analogue in the Northern Hemisphere (the Pacific Northwest), Monterey pine was a third the weight of native trees such as Araucanian pine and could be planted at three times the density. Its profits proved irresistible to several generations of landholders.The Chilean state made a habit of looking to the southern forests as a site for development, embracing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century foresters' recommendations to protect the trees from local communities in order to harvest them. In the 1930s, the state looked to industrial forestry as a potential savior for an economy suffering from closing nitrate mines and declining agricultural production. At the time, Chile's lone paper company bought half its pulp from Scandinavia, despite the nation's abundant forests. The foreign pines spread quickly; by the middle of the 1940s, southern Chile had more than 140,000 hectares of tree plantations. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' Forest Products Commission convened its 1950 conference in Santiago, confirming the country as a force in forest products. And by the eve of Augusto Pinochet's coup, pine had surged over a quarter of a million hectares.In demonstrating that plantation pine production long predated Pinochet's neoliberal economic policies, Klubock revises a version of Chile's economic history that credits the dictatorship with igniting the forestry boom. Klubock's important argument for reperiodization extends also to social history. He describes how deforestation first, and then the turn to pine plantations, changed rural relationships. From the turn of the twentieth century onward, the shifts in approaches to the forests consistently entailed expulsion of rural squatters, Mapuche communities, settlers, and seasonal and ranch laborers from land. They lost access to subsistence plots and to the forests, which they had used for traditional forms of extraction. “Viewed from the southern frontier,” Klubock contends, “the violence of the post-1973 period appears less surprising” (p. 15).Part of the impetus to write La Frontera, Klubock explains, was to “take up the challenge of bringing together social and environmental history” (p. 301). A clutch of Latin Americanist historians over the past decade, including John Soluri, Steve Marquardt, Myrna Santiago, and myself, has pursued a similar goal of combining labor and environmental histories. Arguing along with Gunther Peck that the alienations of nature and labor can be traced in tandem, we have contended with the two processes' divergent timescales. Environmental change often takes longer to unfold than labor's “history of events.” Klubock agrees about the impossibility of “simple reduction, or even correlation, of social to environmental history” (p. 26), and he doesn't claim to provide a thoroughgoing theoretical statement of how best to bring environmental and social history together.His hybrid approach does produce a compelling description of the trajectories of conservationist and environmentalist language and the groups who have used it. His final chapter narrates Mapuche resistance to forestry development, which they have pursued in the past 30 years through an environmentalist critique. For generations, Mapuches were labeled as destructive parasites of forest resources, a discourse that helped to justify the acts of “enclosure” that Klubock describes earlier in the book. This discourse also accompanied the spread of industrial forestry, cast as a solution to erosion as well as an economic stimulant. But by the 1980s, Mapuches had claimed environmentalist rhetoric and wielded it against plantation forestry in challenges that grew more militant in the 1990s. This comprises perhaps the clearest “ecological conflict” mentioned in the book's title.