La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory by Thomas Miller Klubock (review)

Thomas Klubock has written an excellent book based upon exhaustive research that pieces together the social and environmental effects caused by large scale transformations to forests during a sustained period of nation-building and state development in southern Chile. He provides a chronological narrative, one that seeks to locate the origins of today’s “forestry miracle” in complex and contested relationships that began at least a century ago. Klubock explains how forestry development remade the social landscape and how campesinos confronted changing environmental conditions. The setting involves an extensive southern region known colloquially as La Frontera, stretching between the Bío Bío and Toltén rivers and from the Andes to the Pacific.

Klubock begins after the military defeat of the last independent Mapuche groups as the weak state reduced these groups into commonly held and circumscribed settlements. Although European immigration proved paltry, enormous land concessions in this frontier allowed for wheat production to expand alongside livestock rearing and the first conservation reserves. Forestry laws facilitated modern forestry production and secured estate owners’ property rights at the expense of prior rural residents. The system shepherded by the state limited land fraud and unchecked forest clearing, which had social consequences, in particular, violent peasant protests against the enclosure of the lands they used for their livelihoods. Klubock’s investigation shines in his dramatic analysis and close reading of the Ránquil rebellion, an organized uprising against the largest estate families that exposed the ways campesinos’ relationships to the state were also tied to ecological processes.

The 1930s and 1940s brought an abrupt shift away from failed attempts to create a “breadbasket” in the south. Instead, Monterrey pine plantations became the proposed solution to diminished yields and infertile soil. Seen as a way to restore value to increasingly barren lands and combat rampant erosion, pine also promised to link the rural sector to industrial changes. Swapping wheat for pine had major restructuring effects based upon state driven incentives and rewards. By reorganizing land and labour relations, planting pine provided a way to present the state and large landowners as modern and productive. It will come as no surprise that rather than resolve these festering issues, tree plantations created new tensions of their own as they swallowed up peasant lands and depleted rural unionization. By the 1960s, this spiral of degradation and deepening rural poverty created pressures for agrarian reforms. These reforms arrived in earnest with Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency in 1970 only to be swept quickly away in the reactionary dictatorship to follow. At this point, state-sponsored plantations had matured enough to harvest and Pinochet’s regime could take credit for a forestry boom while denying the role of the state in creating the forests and the conditions for the boom. Klubock’s final chapter examines the “Mapuche Challenge” that emerged during the Concertación government to confront the industrial forestry complex.

Klubock’s story is long, dense, detailed, specific, insightful, and necessary. Among its many valuable contributions, two stand out as transformational. First, by painstakingly demonstrating that Chile’s forestry boom was not the work of free market forces but instead the culmination of decades of state-based investment, Klubock historicizes plantations’ deeper context. This provides a critical perspective on public investment and private benefits. Second, he demonstrates the social costs of environmental transformation by following the threads of several specific estates through different phases of forest clearing or afforestation. This gives a clear view of not only these estates but the real experiences of those that worked in the forests by providing a parallel sense of community continuity. Rendered with a clear eye toward the available choices and the agency of rural people, there are no ecological Indians or benevolent rural dwellers here. In addition, devastation in the forests affected agriculture so much so that by 1965 Chile could not feed itself. Industrial production drew not only...