To singe the pudu’s dark fur .. vengeance of the earth, vengeance of solitary waters. Where did the continent’s largest tree go? Who are the traditional caretakers? What violence is hidden beneath the pasture of this “idyllic” farm?

There is a tree 3,649 years old. An alerce. This particular alerce is Gran Abuelo (”Great Grandfather”). On Earth, humans are aware of only two other individual trees known to be older. The alerce species, the tallest tree in South America, has a very small, limited, isolated, endangered distribution range in the Validivian temperate rainforest region, many of the alerce living in the shadow of a prominent volcano.

When the dairy farms arrived, though, fire was set. Trees targeted for elimination and caretakers “pacified.”

So there is the Choco bioregion, a unique tropical rainforest, in a narrow zone along the Pacific coast of Colombia, cut off and isolated from the Amazon by the tall spine of the Andes. Here, it rains over 300 days each year, for a total of over 10,000 millimeters of rain, making it one of the wettest places on the planet. Then, there is the Amazonian rainforest, an entire universe of plant lifeforms, which is so lush that it creates its own weather and regional climates. But the tallest tree on the South American continent is in neither of these regions. This tree does not live in the tropical climate. The world’s largest trees live in temperate rainforest. The temperate rainforest zone of the Pacific Northwest provides habitat for giant California redwoods and redcedars. The temperate rainforest zone of Aotearoa/New Zealand provides habitat for kauri and kahikatea. The temperate rainforest of Valdivia: alerce. Here, on the Pacific coast of so-called “Chile”: At least 50% of all woody plants in the region are endemic, living nowhere else outside of Valdivian temperate rainforest. Here lives a conifer. A cypress. Locally, this species is called alerce, which means simply “larch.” A central species in the rainforest ecosystem, in Euro-Amerian institutional language: “Patagonia cypress.” In Latin, this is Fitzroya cupressoides, which is the only species in its genus, with no close relatives.

Alerce is the tallest and largest tree species on the continent of South America.

The Spanish invasion happened in the mid-1500s. And later, the “independent” Chilean state itself continued to dominate the Pacific coastline with expanding industry and institutions. But still the rainforest persisted under the care of Huilliche-Mapuche people, and it wasn’t until the 1840s that Valdivia’s alerce forests were truly targeted for elimination, when the Chilean state enthusiastically invited German colonists to transform the land into pasture, into “dairy farms.” When online, looking for images of the dramatic landmark Volcano Osorno of the Valdivian temperate rainforest region, many photos are labelled “idyllic,” flanked by calmly grazing cattle, looking like this:

But this is the land of Huilliche-Mapuche people. And before this land was twisted into a German farm-scape, not long ago, the western slopes of Volcano Osorno were lush temperate rainforest not unlike the Pacific Northwest. This space looked more like this:

The rainforest has many endemic animals found nowhere outside of the region: the world’s smallest deer (pudu); the arboreal marsupial monito del monte; the iconic semi-arboreal rainforest cat kodod, land-snails and giant predatory planarian land-worms; and dozens of endemic frogs.

The only known home of the alerce species:

Here’s a quote:

Chilean [and also Huilliche-Mapuche] poet Jaime Huenun’s Reducciones (2012) explores the social and environmental consequences of European colonization since the second  half of the nineteenth century, when southern Chile received thousands of German immigrants as part of a state-sponsored colonization plan. [...] ‘Reducciones’ opening section, “Entrada a Chauracahuin,” which refers to the original name of the contemporary city of Osorno, recounts the history of colonization (...). Today, Holstein cows and red Hereford bulls graze in the vast grasslands of Osorno’s estates.” As is evident in this description, the Osorno region of Chile exemplifies the European imperialistic practice of terraforming its colonies to make them resemble European environments [...].’Huenun demonstrates how slash-and-burn agriculture applied to the Valdivian temperate rainforest has produced “a German or Swiss farm,” as well as enormous biodiversity and cultural losses: “la explotacion civilizada termino con uno de los territorios mas bellos de la tierra, con rios, montanas y bosques interminables, inmensos, misteriosos” (”civilized exploitation put an end to one of the world’s most beautiful territories, with river, mountains, and unending, immense, mysterious forests”). [From: Ida Day. Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Jaime Huenun’s Reducciones. 2016.]

In 1847, the Chilean state and its president passed the Law of Colonization and Vacant Lots, intending to “civilize” the Valdivian temperate rainforest region by inviting German farmers to colonize the Osorno area in the heart of the region. Also in 1847, the state-sponsored group conspicuously named “Sociedad Stuttgart,” through coercion, claimed lands of the Huilliche-Mapuche along the western slopes of Volcano Osorno. But many Mapuche lands were still legally autonomous, and neither German settlers or the Chilean state had established legal right to many of these settlements. So in 1861, when some Mapuche leaders began vocal resistance to the settlement schemes, the Chilean military launched a violent 22-year-long occupation of Mapuche lands of the Valdivian temperate rainforest, known in history books as “the Pacification of Araucania.”

In 1863, to create cattle rangeland and dairy pasture between the largely-German colonial settlements of Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas, just west of Volcano Osorno, settlers intentionally unleashed a forest fire to eliminate the lowland alerce forests. While temperate rainforest clings to the steep mountainous fjords and slopes of the Andes, the rainforest also historically lived throughout the coastal lowlands too. But those lowland forests and bogs were targeted for elimination. (Something similar played out historically in the Pacific Northwest: Lowland hemlock and Douglas fir in the Salish Sea lowlands were erased to make way for colonial settlement and the creation of “Seattle,” where mild climate allows fruit harvest and successful gardening, while, now, temperate rainforest clings to existence in rugged Cascades slopes, where it was historically harder to extract timber.)

Even the charred stumps of the dead alerce were quickly extracted and turned into roofing material. During the first years of German settlement, these alerce-wood shingles were reported to be the only international export from Chiloe and Llanquihue.

Today, Huilliche-Mapuche people have been dispossessed of over 95% of their traditional land.

But dairy farms are no longer the monster that replaces the forests. The rainforest is now replaced by industrial monoculture “tree plantations.” Monoculture meant for timber extraction, monoculture which now takes up about 50% of the Valdivian coastal region. Plantations are marketed as “forests.”

Again, from Ida Day:

”civilized exploitation put an end to one of the world’s most beautiful territories, with river, mountains, and unending, immense, mysterious forests“

Reducciones’ opening section, “Entrada a Chauracahuin,” which refers to the original name of the contemporary city of Osorno, recounts the history of colonization of this region and the emergence of new cultural identities. It also describes the transformations of the natural environment from native forests to the current farmland: “To open the humid and impenetrable jungle of pellin and laurel, to singe the pudu’s dark fur, to melt small antlers of huemul with the embers of a felled coigue,”  these were some of the desires that motivated the transformation of the  Huilliche countryside into haciendas and productive plains. (...) Much more devastating consequences of colonization are revealed in [Jaime Huenun’s] poem “Trumao,” which describes land degraded by agriculture, logging, and ranching. (…) In the Mapuche language, trumao refers to the fertile volcanic soil. It is also the name of a small town in Los Lagos region, which was an important center of economic development between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1960s, providing a port and a train station for transporting agricultural products, animals, and  lumber. (...) The ecological crisis described in “Trumao” (...) turned “ecologically diverse landscapes into monocultural regimes …  spreading cancer (...)”. The opening verse of the poem, “vengeance of the earth, vengeance of solitary waters,” communicates the exploitation and abuse  of the once fertile land (…). The images of the degraded environment in the poem are charged with feelings of loss and alienation: “plastic bottles on the railway, sleeping like rotten corks where assassin wasps tirelessly buzz and nest.”