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Valdivia the bog city thread!

Or, why laziness is ecological praxis

We were talking about whether cities can be good, and how the cultural values of dominion and control are self-defeating. Here’s a super neat example that popped up in Margaret Killjoy's podcast, from guest Jason Sauer.

So, back in the sixties, the city of Valdivia in Chile flooded and sank. There was a terrible earthquake, and the city is in a river confluence area. Some pastures and other territories ended up 10 metres underwater.

Now if you try to handle this like most white people do, like we do it in São Paulo, for example, you would just pave over everything. Build streets and multi-level highways and a park here and there, and pretend it never happened. Civil engineers would be proud of their work, and politicians would pretend it was *their* work and brag about development, and in twenty years people would get used to coping with pestilent floods every summer, until everything collapsed again at the next earthquake, or rising waterline, or ecosystem loss causing riverbank erosion or whatever black-swan comes next.

But instead, the valdivienses went like, you know what fuck it, we're bog city now! Fill the swamps bitches!! They just let the wetlands lie where they may, then built around them, and all the beautiful, highly biodiverse marshes are a touristic attraction and a joy now. The city is much more stable this way, and the wetlands are valuable ecosystem oases protected by law.

Map of major wetlands ("humedales") in Valdivia, meshed right through urban neighbourhoods and highways.

And it's not like it's a one-sided deal, either. The bogs are great for the people too, as areas of enjoyment and learning and just to put you in a good mood, but also for things like native plants gathering, or draining the city. Which sounds like a terrible thing, and it has been many times (for example, once a pulp mill seriously damaged the animals of the Cruces river with excessive runoff). This kind of living-together has to be monitored, has to be a constant renegotiation with constant awareness (at that time, a citizen’s group speaking for the swans mobilised the media, successfuly ran a court case, and got the mill closed).

Slides showing some animals that enjoy the bogs and their outskirts, including ducks and seals and humans and bicycles.

But the thing is, all cities have to drain somewhere, we all produce sewer and other runoff and it all goes somewhere. And in nature there’s no such thing as pollution, really, nitrogen is precious fertiliser, all waste is input to another system, ‘trash’ is someone else’s food that is being mismanaged. The question is how to do society in a way that's beneficial for non-humans too, for the whole system. Or when we can’t be purely beneficial, then at least like, not genocidal. You know? Ecosystems can take a good hit and recover fine, just don't overdo it. Take stuff only to the extent you need to thrive, be grateful for it, show reciprocity—do something for the plants and animals in return. It's all about relationships.

A green bog.

The photo above shows one of the wetlands that directly touches a populated urban area. It’s bright green in this photo, probably with blooming algae growth from runoff, I’d think. Is this good? Is it bad? I have no idea, but I will maintain that it’s better like this than hidden from sight in some far-away paved dam. Cursory readings about the area seem to indicate they’re doing OK at keeping it manageable.

I'm not saying Valdivia is an ecological exemplar or solarpunk inspiration stan, the city does a ton of bad things too (e.g. their economy being all on monosilviculture, or when that absolutely disgusting fucker Pinochet built car bridges which decimated the previously booming, and much superior in all regards, use of the waterways as a primary means of transport). I'm sure that if you ask a Valdivian they'll instantly start ranting about how many different ways the city sucks, maybe there's a ton of crime or traffic accidents I don’t know. What I'm saying is just that, in this one specific issue—“ok folks we lost a lot of economically valuable land to this earthquake flood; what to do now?”—they picked the right anwser, and the right answer is: do nothing, don't try to control everything, dude just like relax a bit, be kind, be lazy, adapt to what’s already there.

River forks enveloping factory buildings, fields, and houses.

I imagine the factory with white smoke above is doing pulp processing (I come from pulp monoculture areas too, it feels familiar). I avoided the more pretty tourist photos because I don’t want to romanticise this, I looked for the images that felt most down-to-earth. What I like about this city isn’t what it is now, but what it points to, the direction it took a step towards. All this human activity, all this human life right between the waters, trying to find ways to live alongside water beings. The letting go of control.

Boat-taxi companies are currently making a welcome comeback, producing their own electricity and cleaning their own wastewater via bacterial methods. Like OK this is ecocapitalism, but people don’t do stuff like this *just* for profit (if it’s just for profit there’s better ROI, e.g. pulp monosilviculture). There’t good PR in it precisely because it gives everybody a good mood. If everybody is living close by the bogs, not stuck in the air-conditioned bubbles of cars but seeing up close the animals and flowers and butterflies that thrive in the bogs, then you too start caring about bogs, you don’t want the sewers to be untreated and make them disgusting if they’re right by your backyard, if you see the swans every day and one day they start dying en masse you feel personally attacked. Relating positively to the world isn’t just a matter of technological or economic changes; it has do to with living alongside other living beings, living up close with the world. It also has to do with ways of seeing the world that build in us the ability, the skillset to understand other beings as fellow people, rather than objects or loot.

Photo of people holding a banner: "In Valdivia we fill the swamps up!"

Think of #bogLife as part of Valdivian identity, of their sense of presence in the world, of community and aesthetics and pride. We will never get anywhere trying to rescue, preserve, or protect everybody who is non-human, to put everybody in glass domes as a ‘pristine nature’ that our very touch corrupts. The converse of this is that everywhere we make our homes gets framed as non-nature, ‘city’ as something just for humans. Then we franctically try to micromanage every little aspect of it, and fail. The way forward is to recognise that we humans live alongside and within and in relationship with everybody else, and then make those relationships work well. This is recognition is, before everything else, ethics.

In the case of Patagonia, the major philosophical influence is Mapuche thought: The notion of kume mongen, good-living, joyful-living. Kume mongen principles include things that may sound primitive or superstitious to civilised society, like ‘sleep with your head pointing north’ (n.b. pointing south for you gringos in the Northern hemisphere). But most of it is more general ethic guidelines or daily life principles, sounding more like:

Maintain awareness of your community and of the ways you depend on it.
Know how to take well from Earth and Sun, and how to give back.
Only do labour with joy, not suffering. Painful labour means something is wrong.
Dance.
Remember that you never walk alone; exercise in your mind the thought of all the other beings who are walk with you at all times, right now, both human and non-human.
Eat the food that comes from the specific season and location and situation. Eat the food that fits everything best.
Learn how to dream well at night.

Some Mapuche cosmological diagrams.

Full disclosure I’m a mystic and a total sucker for these things, but I want to emphasise here that indigenous ways of seeing don’t *require* commitment to any non-physicalist epistemology. These are systems of thought, and systems of thought can be studied critically, argued with, learned from. None of the principles above are incompatible with being rational or technological or scientific…

Screenshot of slides about ‘the human being as one among many natural factors’.

…like in this presentation discussing the concept of ‘socioecosystem’, from the Foundation Centre of Native Woods in the area. The author, Alberto Tacón, is an academic environmental biologist from the Universidad Austral de Chile, a professional ecologist and published researcher. He’s also where I got that introduction to Mapuche thought from; he has written peer-reviewed journal articles on things like the medicinal properties of Mapuche traditional plants, e.g. the maqui fruit and the ‘natural soap’ quillay, which he learned from the folk, and has written extensively on their society and philosophy.

So even if you’re 100% a materialist sceptic interested only in advanced computers and smart houses, I invite you to consider for a while the systemic effects if general principles similar to kume mogen (or the North American ‘honourable harvest’, or Australian Aboriginal ‘custodianship’ etc.) were normalised as part of everybody’s education, of the common fabric of society.

This is why I’m always raving about re-indiginisation. Forms of seeing the world similar to kume mogen are super widespread; anthropologically this vibe is the norm, really, and for good reason. It’s not like indigenous folk are pure uncorrupted children who just didn’t think enough thoughts to fall into sin yet; native communities have abusers and everything else bad just like us. Only difference is they didn’t build their societies over an ideology that everything exists to serve us. The reason these values endure has nothing to do with population density or technology, it’s, today just like long ago, maintaned through effort, debate, argument, reason, political struggle, communal education. Combat, sometimes. Indigenous thought is also philosophy, politics, agriculture, economy, urbanism.

And if so many radically different socities have embedded themselves in the world in positive webs of reciprocity, then we can do it too. There’s nothing the Mapuche have that you don’t, we can make new societies be like this rather than base them on dominion. We can have continent-spanning hospitality zones covering decentralised classless federated megacities again. Anarchist catgirl forestbiotechcity is what I'm saying.

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most content about the city learned via:

forecos: fundación centro de los bosques nativos

was introduced to it by:

Jason Sauer interview on Live Like the World is Dying podcast