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Thomas Miller Klubock , La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile's Frontier Territory (Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press , 2014), pp. ix + 385, $99.95, $27.95 pb; £65.00, £17.99 pb.
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La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile's Southern Frontier uses social and environmental history, from a 'bottom-up' analytical framework, to understand the origins of Chile's forestry boom and the recent conflicts between Mapuche communities and forestry companies. But the first historical actor in this monograph is the forest. Land that is now covered with vast Monterey pine plantations had been, since the mid-nineteenth century, forested by an 'impenetrable' (p. 46) intermingling of trees, including araucaria pine, beech and larch, providing cover for a dense undergrowth of wild bamboo and vines.
Klubock organises his analysis of how regimented pine came to replace native forest chronologically, beginning in the 1850s with the Chilean state's conquest and colonisation of this region. In this period, about two-thirds of the region's defeated Mapuche communities were pushed onto reducciones, with offered neither sufficient land nor secure tenure; the remaining third received no land at all. Most of the land was 'unoccupied', or showing no indication of human 'improvements', and claimed by the state. This classification provided an incentive to clear, fence and farm the forests in order to establish property rights. Thus a cycle emerged of burning native forests, exhausting the soil through wheat cultivation, then letting the native grasses and bamboo...