The Disaster of Arborization and What Wildfires Reveal in Central Chile

ABSTRACT In the summer of 2017, the largest wildfires ever recorded in central Chile swept through and devastated the small logging town of Santa Olga. Within hours, decades of work by the timber industry and its laborers were wiped out, leaving no trace of what had been built. Alongside the destruction, the fire also exposed a deeper truth: for the Santa Olguinos, the catastrophe laid bare how the industry regarded their lives and belongings as no more valuable than the pine trees grown for cellulose production. Furthermore, Santa Olguinos seem deeply attached to their way of life, so much that, in the aftermath of the catastrophe, their only desire is to see it restored. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during Santa Olga's reconstruction, this article examines the tragedy by tracing how the town's development and eventual destruction were shaped over decades of extractivism, which profoundly altered both the local environment and the lives of its people. In doing so, we deal with how fire acquires ambivalence in the eyes of the affected population; it appears as the necessary corollary to a history of savage environmental exploitation, but simultaneously allows to unmask the alienation, dependence, and domination at the core of those activities.