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The tragedy in which we find ourselves in Chile, as a consequence of the enormous fires in the Valparaíso Region, which have left more than 100 dead, 300 missing, more than 3000 burned houses, many pets lost and thousands of hectares burned, has been devastating for the country, declaring a state of emergency and national mourning by the government of Gabriel Boric.
Hence, everything has been concentrated on putting out the fires and providing the corresponding help to all the affected families, who are in a true hell, especially in cities like Viña del Mar, Quilpué, Villa Alemana and Limache, where the authorities, firefighters and different civil society organizations are giving their all in the face of these dramatic circumstances.
However, this catastrophe has also been accompanied by a poor public debate about the causes of these fires, focusing on the intentionality of certain groups in their spread, instead of the historical-structural causes and the lack of socio-environmental policies that allow for systemic responses to all this.
Hence it has been said that the fires have been caused by political groups, vandals and even by a cartel in the real estate sector, which would be using terror as a means to generate institutional destabilization and economic benefit from the tragedy we are experiencing. We thus forget that it is found within a context of climate crisis and increasing global temperature, not giving it the weight it should have.
I raise this because without denying the intentionality of many fires, as well as the necessary investigation by the justice system of those responsible, I feel that we are not taking the weight as a society to the historical relationship that we have had as human beings with fire and to a hegemonic system of life that is completely unsustainable with the care of life on the planet, which is the real cause of what is happening to us in Chile as well as throughout the world.
This is what has been pointed out by different researchers, such as Stephen J. Pyne, who has said that our relationship with fire, since its discovery and use, a million years ago, then due to its dominance since the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of the first great civilizations, and finally with their total conquest with the arrival of Western, capitalist and industrial modernity, they laid the foundations for a way of relating to our environment that got out of hand.
In other words, it is what Pyne calls the Pyrocene, which, like the notion of Anthropocene, shows us how our evolution as human beings has brought an increasingly greater differentiation with our environment. Only in the case of fire, although it brought enormous developments to our lives (food, heating), it has also brought with it its use for battles, wars and massacres between human beings and a conquest of nature. And it has reached its peak with the burning of fossil fuels and the unbridled expansion of capitalism.
Consequently, what is behind all these fires and environmental crises is a historical separation between culture and nature, which may have brought an enormous technological leap, but at the cost of the death and destruction of entire communities and territories, in the name of progress, revolution or development, to the detriment of other ways of living that are much more harmonious with the ecosystems and the reproduction of life on Earth.
It seems to me that we are once again falling into the same mistake of the pandemic, focusing on how to combat it and even installing conspiracy theories, about who supposedly created Covid-19, instead of also seeing it as a historical process, heir to the separation of culture and nature, and as a response to a capitalist world system, which with the delusional idea of ????unlimited economic growth, is leading us to a civilizational collapse.
Having said all the above, and returning to what is happening in Chile at the moment with the fires, I hope that the discussion stops focusing on something mere security and also in a conspiratorial manner, both on the left and on the right, and we open up to see it from a broad and holistic perspective. We must understand that what is happening is connected to how poorly we have linked ourselves with the territories and the planet for a long time, without realizing it.
For this reason, we welcome all views and measures that raise criticism of a prevailing forest extractivist, real estate and consumerist model, but also of alternatives focused on providing sustainable and caring responses to what we have called the environment, through reforestation policies. , soil restoration, territorial planning and urgent socio-environmental education, which generates a profound change in how we relate to life.
