“This is my home,” my mother says to me one overcast day.
Picture this: mother and daughter are sitting on the couch together, our ponchos pooling and swallowing us whole. We are looking at a picture on the internet, a snapshot of the valley in Petorca. My mother was born in that Chilean city, a tiny bird nestled in the bosom of the Andes, gasping through thin air and an ever-evolving awe of the world. I expect, watching her then, a cloud of nostalgia to fog her eyes, for her to fly away from me and the couch here in Canada.
She does not fly away. I notice her speech warbles with hesitation, her throat holding that last word down, home, dragging it out long and narrow like the country. How I remember her staring, the rubbing of her eyes, the drugstore eyedrops, and the small circle of her mouth.
When she finally says it again—“This is my home”—no longer is it a statement, rather a climb, peaking in a question. She leaves me behind then to dash to the safe upstairs, rummaging through our family’s birth certificates and citizen papers and passports and who knows what, until she brings back to me an old picture.
My fingers retain still the feeling of that smooth, glossy paper; of how I turn it, checking the back to see ink splotches faded with time:
Lxxx, Petorca, 1975.
Wistfulness, I understand then, means there is some semblance of a home to yearn for. There is still something there to return to—yes, there could be little differences here and there—but you can walk the land and observe, with tinted sunglasses, a kaleidoscope of memories and endless futures gleaming in the sunset.
Nothing of that nature is found in the photograph in her hands—it is a reality which does not exist anymore. It was, as I consider the image, something beautiful, with swathes of green and yellow and blue. It was, she tells me, the place she was happiest in, even if she did not have hot water or had to use an outhouse or went hungry. It is, as I discover, somehow, the same place as the cracked, parched desert on the internet labelled Petorca. The jarring combination of speaking, of thinking, all at once present, past, and unknown, makes for an ominous blanket heavier than the warmest poncho.
This is my home? This cannot be my home. Did I ever have one? I had one, I know I did, once, but it is not this. How long can the world go on for? How long can I?
“What happened to the river?” I say, taking the role of the fool who asks obvious questions before a disaster foretold.
I remember the soft curve of her jaw as she cranes her head to our popcorn ceiling, going past it to enter something holy and safe.
“God help us all,” she responds.
What can one say about the environment that has not already been said? How could we reconcile with the fact that the place we were born will not be the same place we will die, even if the maps, even if our hearts, say otherwise?
My old university here in Canada floats on top of a marsh. I can feel the chill of the mornings I’ve spent walking along watery pathways, frogs croaking and salamanders whirling near my feet; occasionally, on these walks, my eyes wandered to the trail of smoke that wafts up from the clanging industrial parts of the city. Group projects in my academic career consisted of developing apps that would help the user report turtles crushed and splattered by cars, to hopefully have someone help take them to wildlife rescues. My lectures had many students yawning through the degradation of our Great Lakes, a source of life, with algae blooms and gifts of spewing sewage and oil spills.
At these institutions, one looks at the data; one maps and calculates and writes obligatory reflections that are more opinion pieces on the reality of things, and then one moves on. Moving on commonly means a hiring event where major oil and mining companies, among others in little cliques of giggling imperialistic friends, gather us ready and bright-eyed, one by one.
A funny thing: my tía abuela, Juana, a stout woman in her nineties, still works to run a family goat farm in Chile. My tía sends my mother a video of the old woman on the news, appearing on the screen with hands curling like tendrils in a garden.
“No way,” I say, looking at the old woman in amazement, seeing a continent of toughness etched on her pixelated face. “She’s still alive?”
My mother slaps me before she starts the clip again, leaning in, trying to listen to her tía’s words carefully.
Petorca province is a major provider of that emerald jewel of a fruit, the avocado—la palta—which can only grow in certain regions. A just right environment is mandatory for the fussy fruit. Raising them requires 320 litres of water per avocado. Agricultural companies and politicians and the like illegally divert the coursing river to these fields. Once grown, they are exported to a European or North American country, a destiny coded on stickers and red-flag sale signs, all to end up part of people’s self care smoothie or a sandwich in a bougie restaurant.
There, on television, my tía abuela Juana speaks of the town’s water crisis: people cannot wash their clothes, they cannot take showers, crops are wilting, livestock dying from dehydration. She could not afford to buy the avocados that her neighbours grow. She is still alive, yes, todo bien gracias a Dios, but who knows about the well-being of her children, many who work at the farm, if all her goats die from no water? What about her grandchildren; her great great-great-grandchildren; her great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren?
In the climate crisis, it is those at risk—ones statistically contributing the least to global pollution and energy consumption—who will encounter the worst effects of it. Though I believe that designating those at risk is to make the sacrificial lamb a matter of inheritance, instead of the truth of chronic disenfranchisement, of intentional displacement. Everything has a price to it, and some people are willing to be paid. Even the world burning has a price.
In Chile, Patagonian fluvial systems, running like veins to the end of the world, suffer as their ecosystems are upset by deforestation and pollution. Lithium exploitation in the name of green electromobility in turn consumes water in the north, with mining sites near primarily Indigenous communities. In my home here in Canada, water still has material needs we must provide, a necessary relationship that the media calls disruptive and violent and holding this country back. The water does not need oil spills and fertilizer pollution and waste; it does not need to water golf courses or suburban lawns or mall fountains; it does not need people to face police brutality for protesting these violations.
There are things to say about Indigenous sovereignty. There are things to say on how the fight against colonisation is the fight for water justice. There are things to say about our power as a group of people, that through each home we love, those which are fracturing like cracks in clay, we make our attempts at resilience. We survive. Fight.
I do not write about this for the love of writing about this. I do not write believing I have a voice that is good or matters above the rest. Those things to say on environmental justice perhaps are said better by others instead of me: an overwrought, disabled, neurotic Latina, with a persistent fear of misstepping hovering over me like a fly. However, now is the time where we must drive our purpose towards the collective needs of our people, and to the land.
I laugh when someone asks me if I consider myself an academic or a writer. It is unnatural for me in those ecosystems. What is there for people in that hierarchy of beings, with those intellectuals that love to create and fondle and debate among each other? However, I do consider myself an eternal student, and read anything that could explain the seedlings of questions that sprout from my chest: what is justice, what is the environment, who are we all in between?
Taking an Indigenous Knowledge class, I loved my time there, my professor almost lulling me with stories and exciting me in challenging the normative way of thinking, even when it was difficult at times. There I read and analysed, as part of our curriculum, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass.
“Wow,” I wrote to my professor late in the evening, happy to see the poetry in the world around us translated to words I could finally comprehend. “She’s just like me. For real!”
I believe the part of the book I just must write about goes like this, after introducing the reader to the Onondaga Thanksgiving Address: “Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.”
A great achievement of colonialism is that it convinces people that hyper-individualism is good. That there is not a right to anything unless you buy it. This is seen in Chile, with waters regulated by private property laws, which are a symptom of the infection of neoliberalism, implemented after the coup of 1973. For how could one own water? Why do government officials hand water out on a first-come first-served basis? The delusion of hyper-individualism creates the mantra this is just the way things are, that it is natural for an old woman to go on television and plead for water in the community and to stop desecrating the land she was born on.
It cannot be an individual’s responsibility to save watery ecosystems and the turtles by banning straws; we cannot turn up our nose at disabled people’s need for plastic straws and not do a thing to, say, fast fashion companies overflowing landfills and causing water pollution with last micro-season’s trends. It is abhorrent that the average person’s carbon footprint is always scrutinized, yet a celebrity can use private jets to fly mere minutes on a whim. There is a need for community. There is a duty we must fulfill to each other and the land.
Because for what, for whom, do we declare environmental justice?
There may not be a complete reversal of the climate crisis. That opportunity may very likely wave us by. Unprecedented times are precedent-setting times. Yet it is still within our power to continue forward. I do not mean that we all hold hands together and sing la-la-de-da, because there are those that oppose what needs to be done. There are those who will say that this injustice, these crises, are not real, even when we look at them in our own backyards. I also do not mean that progress, even technological progress, is bad, for there are things like ecological socialism to take into consideration as we move forward, ever forward. There is no one solution that may tie up neatly in a bow; we must think of the tangible, we must think of each other, and not fall into traps of ecofascism or relentless nihilism.
We live in a perfect green and blue spaceship. This is our home. We are born here, of course we will take care of it, one way or another.
After we watch the news and say our goodbyes to my tía, my mother and I prepare food together. She speaks of childhood memories while baking fresh bread; I simmer with the squash soup in all the ways I feel helpless—and all the ways I feel hopeful—about my power in this world.
When I sit with my family at the dinner table, that precious glass of water stays by my hand, waiting to give me a gift, and I accept it in each swallow. Tomorrow, I think to myself, tomorrow I’ll return the gift, in full.
While forks scrape plates and conversations lull, my mind drifts away: to snowy peaks and pine trees and endless sky. I remember the smell of the sea, the sun on my back, the green of the valley. I dream of mountain goats following at the heels of an old woman. I see the happiness that land gave my mother in her smile.
But what about the river? Its silence now is louder than the rush of water ever was. I hope our children hear its song again, one day. I hope our children have a glass of you, dear river.
Pero todos bien gracias a Dios, y mi gente.
References
Wall Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions.