New Left Review 96, November-December 2015

Jeffery Webber

GREEN DEVELOPMENT?

Flying into the southern Chilean city of Concepción, a magnificent pine forest stretches below, carpeting the slopes of the coastal mountains and running down to the Pacific shore. [1] Thomas Miller Klubock, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory, Duke University Press: Durham, nc 2014, $27.95, paperback 416 pp, 978 082 2 35603 5 Yet as Thomas Klubock reveals in La Frontera, the pines are not really forests at all but vast plantations of North American conifers. Aerial spraying has purged them of insect, fungal or vegetable life. The endless stands of Monterey pine have none of the variegated life associated with native woodland ecosystems—no intermingling of plant and tree species, no underbrush or climbing creepers, no leaf mould, no animals, no people. Concepción, at the mouth of the River Bío Bío, is the gateway to Chile’s industrial forestry region which stretches south for several hundred miles, bordered by the Andes to the east and by the coastal cordillera to the west, down to the far-south city of Valdivia and the region of the great lakes. Forestry is the country’s third-largest source of foreign exchange, after mining and industry, and the Monterey’s success story has been claimed as a key to the ‘Chilean miracle’, a paradigm for green development.

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