By Karen Holmberg
Deadly wildfires broke out in Valparaíso, Chile on February 2, 2024. Like all disasters, they were a hybrid admix of natural and cultural factors. Drought, a heat wave, high wind, flammable housing construction, narrow streets that prevent fire truck access, and arson combined to char at least 290 square kilometers of land, damage more than 14,000 buildings, and kill at least 131 people with hundreds more still missing and many thousands made homeless. An official state of emergency and two days of mourning was declared by Chilean President Gabriel Boric for the fires.
The uncanniness of watching the spread and toll of these fires from afar came from a sense of discomfort at how close in time and space we all are from disasters of the past and future. Along with Amy Obermeyer, I spent January 7, only a few weeks prior, in Valparaíso with a group of Gallatin students. This trip was part of the Americas Scholars course, “States of Emergency and Disaster,” designed by Prof. Jacob Remes. In harmony with the theme of the course, Jacob missed this portion of the trip while battling COVID in our ongoing pandemic, which is still not endemic. He was greeted by rousing applause when he was able to join us and the students enthusiastically briefed him on their experiences with sites of detention and torture (Villa Grimaldi), memorial (The Memory and Human Rights Museum), and various disaster prevention and mitigation scholars prior to his arrival.
Valparaíso stood out for the students in their descriptions of what Jacob missed. They appreciated the beauty they found in its port and its vibrant street art scene and lively restaurants. Many of them had lobbied hard for us to change the itinerary and stay longer in Valpo, as locals call it. One found unexpected and poignant camaraderie through conversations with fellow displaced Palestinians, who have a notable presence in the city. More than one student made bucket list notes to return for New Year’s Eve as the city’s celebration is considered to rank with those of Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, and Bangkok in its revelry.
The full trip stretched from January 5-15 and covered the arc of disasters and states of emergency of many kinds: the US-backed coup led by Augusto Pinochet and the torture and disappearances associated with it, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, droughts, fires, and volcanic eruptions. One speaker wryly noted that because of a tornado outbreak in 2019, the only hazards that Chile currently lacks are hurricanes and Godzilla. No seismic tremors occurred during the trip, which was a disappointment to some as we were aware of how well designed Chilean architecture is and felt relatively safe at the prospect of experiencing a small one. None of us could predict, of course, that we would within the coming spring semester experience a Magnitude 4.8 earthquake in New York City on April 5. The unexpected earthquake in New York made international news and created a swirl of excitement and some trepidation in the city. It also gave context to the oft repeated comment by the Chileans who accompanied us on our travels that they literally do not register anything lower than a Magnitude 7 and tend to not even feel it.
Volcanoes began our trip through a presentation on our first day in Santiago at the Universidad Católica de Chile that focused not on their destructiveness but in their resonance in Chilean art and the sense of the living landscape they exemplify. At the very end of our trip, we visited the SENAPRED Los Lagos, which is the National Service for Disaster Prevention and Response based in the city of Puerto Montt. There, we had lively and highly engaging presentations of the volcanological and other monitoring systems in place and educational outreach they conduct regularly. We were even able to get into their monitoring room to see live data collection. The next day, many students chose to spend a day hiking Osorno volcano under an expansive blue sky. We were accompanied by a large, friendly dog who seemed to know his way around and we learned to use leafy branches to swat away insects. The hike ended with a panoramic view of Petrohué lake. The volcano was not a source of risk or danger on our trip. It was instead a source of wonder and the sublime when we landed and one of beauty and comfort before the long series of flights back to New York.
Beauty and comfort, of course, were the antipode of the primary focus of the trip and the course.
One important component of the class, as explicitly stated by Jacob Remes in the course description, was “how can one travel to disaster sites for study or research but avoid falling into the trap of disaster tourism?” It is a poignant question and one that students grappled with very critically throughout the trip. In general, for them the imaginary spectrum between the artificial duality of nature and culture skewed toward placing emphasis on human factors related to neoliberal practices and atrocities committed to maintain political power rather than the geophysical world. The ability to understand the temporality and materiality of disasters is a confronting challenge. As Maurice Blanchot states at the opening of The Writing of the Disaster (1995: 1), “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact … .We are on the edge of a disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat…. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think.” For all of us on the trip, Chile provided us a great deal to think about regarding past and future disasters.