Mining and Industrial Action in the Huasco Valley, Atacama Region, Chile. A Socio-Ecological View

Abstract

The article proposes four interfaces that highlight the importance of mining and industrial action as agents of transformations that, at least from the 18th century onwards, conditioned the trajectory of many natural and social processes in the Huasco Valley. These interfaces correspond to: the logging and disappearance of vernacular vegetation during the 18th century; the expansion of mining capital in the agricultural sector and the deterioration and decline of the area's forest biomass between 1820 and 1850; a second expansion of mining capital that, coming from the salt pampas, invested in the agricultural development of Huasco between 1890 and 1930; and finally, the arrival of the Pacific Steel Company in the valley in the mid-20th century. At present, processes of resistance to the socio-ecological crisis can be detected that are synonymous with active social participation as a way of building a new distributive order capable of regulating social entropy and the biophysical environment based on knowledge and future expectations. This translates into modifying asymmetries in access, management and allocation of benefits and externalities that imply unequal ecological exchanges and, in the same way, to correct the absence of the State as an organizing and regulating entity of economic interests whose actions strongly impact the destiny of territories such as the one studied.