Abstract
Since the first settlers arrived in Aysén from the Archipelago of Chiloé, residents have depended on the abundant hardwood forests of the region to cook and heat their homes. Aysén’s continued isolation and recent battles over hydroelectric development on the Pasqua and Baker rivers have assured the continued importance of firewood as a heat source, even in the most modern homes, and today more than 700 families across the region work in the firewood trade. This chapter, based on ethnographic research in southern Chile in 2015–2016, examines the challenges faced by firewood traders (leñeros) throughout Aysén. Recent state involvement in the industry has ranged from efforts to regulate the quality of fuelwood to initiatives to subsidize its associated costs. New concerns about air quality in cities like Coyhaique are beginning to affect the trade, perhaps changing how Ayséninos think about firewood—and by extension, their long-standing traditions.
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Notes
- 1.
Translation by the author.
- 2.
Research was funded through a Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant provided by Institute for the Study of the Americas, a Thomas F. Ferdinand Summer Research Fellowship from the Graduate School, and a Harriet J. Kupferer Graduate Investigators Grant from the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
- 3.
A pseudonym. With the exception of government officials who granted explicit permission, all names that appear in this chapter have been changed to protect the anonymity of participants.
- 4.
Since Chile instituted a quota system within its fisheries, many of the islands fishermen have given up subsistence altogether, and sell their quotas directly to the industrial fishing firms operating in the region. This has given them greater flexibility in terms of the hours in which they are able to transport firewood from nearby islands.
- 5.
Fires are so common that the cost of insuring your home against this kind of disaster is prohibitive for all but the wealthiest residents.
- 6.
They even rolled out a new section of their website where residents can enter their RUT (Chilean national identity number) and see if they qualify, though Claudia freely admitted that this was little help when it came to providing services to families who lacked internet access either because they could not afford it or because they were older and had never learned to use the internet—or in some cases what it is.
- 7.
The word that most used was “aprovechar” a verb that means “take advantage of,” “use,” “leverage,” or “make the most of” depending on context.
- 8.
This risk is very real. Portions of Torres del Paine National Park, just south of Aysén in the Magallanes Region, burned because of fires by backpackers in 1985, 2005, and 2011. In January 2017, the worst wildfires in Chilean history burned some 900,000 acres in the middle of the country. This was the result of an explosive combination: long-term drought, unprecedented summer temperatures, and changing land use patterns.
- 9.
According to the WHO annual mean levels of PM 2.5 above 35μg/m3 are associated with significantly higher risk of mortality.
- 10.
Another city surrounded by a ring of mountains where the contamination is bad enough that certain districts, though not the affluent comunas of Los Condes and Vitacura, have outlawed the burning of firewood altogether.
- 11.
Quoted in El Divisadero, p. 24, Año XXII, No. 6286 July 1, 2015.
- 12.
Indeed, the general lack of fossil fuels within Chile’s borders (particularly compared to neighboring Argentina) has long been considered a threat to national security, and the mining of relatively limited coal deposits around Lota has played on outsize role in Chilean politics (see Pavilack 2011).
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Thomas, E.H. (2018). Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Firewood Trade in Southern Chile. In: Daughters, A., Pitchon, A. (eds) Chiloé. Ethnobiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91983-6_6
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