A “forest” Is Not “good” Just Because There Are Many Trees: The Destruction Of Valdivian Temperate

A “forest” is not “good” just because there are many trees: The destruction of Valdivian temperate rainforest landscapes, their replacement with industrial monoculture tree plantations, what “forests” mean in popular imaginary.

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Landscapes are shaped over time by the changing imaginaries that result from new representations of nature and the value associated with it. […] [E]volving discourses […] have shaped the perception of the landscape in two socially and ecologically significant contexts in Chile. The first is the central-southern region of the country, a large portion of which is now devoted to commercial forestry plantations. […] The representation that was made of central-southern Chile in the 50’ and 60’ as a deforested and degraded land was the justification for promoting a new form of land occupation: the monoculture forest, designed and executed by a specific law. Forty years on from the passing of this law, the plantations of central-southern Chile have undergone a process of naturalization. In this case, the exaltation of nature has been permanent (before and after the changes doing by this law). The only thing that changes is the definition of nature, which ended up including forest plantations. That is, discourses influence perceptions and these lead to new practices […]. These estates have been consolidated with the help of policies implemented primarily during the second half of the twentieth century, and today form vast extensions of commercial monoculture forestry plantations.

H. Lefebvre makes an interesting point on this subject by underlining the idea of representations. The author claims that the notion of nature is a nostalgia, and that it lends itself to manipulation […]. What is this nature that lies at the heart of this discussion? Swyngedouw (2015) and Castree (2005, 2008, 2014) claim that [contemporary categorization of] nature […] has contributed strongly to the consolidation of a neoliberal approach to our relationship with our surroundings, strongly supported by notions such as governance, management, value attribution and services. […] Toward the end of the 1930s, there emerged a generation of agronomists concerned with the conservation of natural resources […]. In 1951 they launched a channel for promoting their ideas and interests: the Revista Forestal Chilena (Chilean Forestry Review). The publication made the case for the country’s “forestry vocation”, and emphasized the need for the industry to be developed. One year on, the timber producers’ trade association Corporación de la Madera (CORMA) was formed. […]

Besides aligning itself with the developmentalist discourse that predominated in the country at the time, CORMA introduced the (eminently determinist) idea that Chile was “a forest country”: that this was its nature, and that it was this activity which would be the source of its wealth and prosperity. This definition of a natural vocation considered the exploitation not only of “jungles” (native forest), but also of “artificial forests.” […] The president of the trade association, Julián Echavarri, expressed himself in similar terms in 1956, adding a certain nationalist flare to the forestry discourse […].

Later, with the advent of the military dictatorship (1973–1989), a new economic development strategy was adopted based on expansion of the export sector […] by means of an aggressive development policy embodied by Decree Law N. 701 of 1974, which established a series of forestation initiatives. The most important of these was a 75% subsidy on the cost of forestation. At the same time, development loans were offered by the Central Bank to stimulate private forestry […]. Meanwhile, State-owned forested areas were passed into the hands of forestry companies. […] The area planted with exotic species went from 576 thousand hectares in 1975 to almost 3.7 million hectares in 2014 […].

Meanwhile, for the people who spent their childhood in areas dominated by forestry operations, the plantations were a place of recreation and fantasy. […] For these generations, the pines are part of their landscape. […]  Similarly, city dwellers, and those people who live in regions further to the north who have never had contact with other types of forest, also believe that these forests are natural. […] [T]hey place new value on these artificial forests. Many of the plantations were located on the western slopes of the Coastal Range, and with time they became forests with a sea view. […]

[T]he natural landscape that has been generated in this sector of Chile’s Coastal Mountain Range is the result of a mechanism of economic production that sought to recover the profitability and productivity of the land […]. In the context of extreme neoliberal economies like Chile, discourses which drive the need for or desirability of natural landscapes appear in fact to accentuate inequality and lead to a distancing from the very objectives of environmentally sustainable development.

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Enrique Aliste, Mauricio Folchi, and Andres Nunez. “Discourses of Nature in New Perceptions of the Natural Landscape in Southern Chile.” Frontiers in Psychology. 17 July 2018.