“If You Will Grant Me One Vivid Morning, I Can Chain It To Me For Fifty Years.”

“The earth turned to bring us closer, it spun on itself and within us, and finally joined us together in this dream.”

— Eugenio Montejo, from “The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer,” The Trees: Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2004)

From a documentary about Akha people (an indigenous tribe to mountain forests in Thailand). Like many other indigenous people in the world, they are blamed for environmental destruction (despite taking care of the land and maintaining biodiversity), and were forcefully relocated so loggers and industrial farmers could use the land and use impoverished Akha people as laborers.

the next kiss i kiss will leave us feelin richer

A “forest” is not “good” just because there are many trees: The destruction of Valdivian temperate rainforest landscapes, their replacement with industrial monoculture tree plantations, what “forests” mean in popular imaginary.

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Landscapes are shaped over time by the changing imaginaries that result from new representations of nature and the value associated with it. […] [E]volving discourses […] have shaped the perception of the landscape in two socially and ecologically significant contexts in Chile. The first is the central-southern region of the country, a large portion of which is now devoted to commercial forestry plantations. […] The representation that was made of central-southern Chile in the 50’ and 60’ as a deforested and degraded land was the justification for promoting a new form of land occupation: the monoculture forest, designed and executed by a specific law. Forty years on from the passing of this law, the plantations of central-southern Chile have undergone a process of naturalization. In this case, the exaltation of nature has been permanent (before and after the changes doing by this law). The only thing that changes is the definition of nature, which ended up including forest plantations. That is, discourses influence perceptions and these lead to new practices […]. These estates have been consolidated with the help of policies implemented primarily during the second half of the twentieth century, and today form vast extensions of commercial monoculture forestry plantations.

H. Lefebvre makes an interesting point on this subject by underlining the idea of representations. The author claims that the notion of nature is a nostalgia, and that it lends itself to manipulation […]. What is this nature that lies at the heart of this discussion? Swyngedouw (2015) and Castree (2005, 2008, 2014) claim that [contemporary categorization of] nature […] has contributed strongly to the consolidation of a neoliberal approach to our relationship with our surroundings, strongly supported by notions such as governance, management, value attribution and services. […] Toward the end of the 1930s, there emerged a generation of agronomists concerned with the conservation of natural resources […]. In 1951 they launched a channel for promoting their ideas and interests: the Revista Forestal Chilena (Chilean Forestry Review). The publication made the case for the country’s “forestry vocation”, and emphasized the need for the industry to be developed. One year on, the timber producers’ trade association Corporación de la Madera (CORMA) was formed. […]

Besides aligning itself with the developmentalist discourse that predominated in the country at the time, CORMA introduced the (eminently determinist) idea that Chile was “a forest country”: that this was its nature, and that it was this activity which would be the source of its wealth and prosperity. This definition of a natural vocation considered the exploitation not only of “jungles” (native forest), but also of “artificial forests.” […] The president of the trade association, Julián Echavarri, expressed himself in similar terms in 1956, adding a certain nationalist flare to the forestry discourse […].

Later, with the advent of the military dictatorship (1973–1989), a new economic development strategy was adopted based on expansion of the export sector […] by means of an aggressive development policy embodied by Decree Law N. 701 of 1974, which established a series of forestation initiatives. The most important of these was a 75% subsidy on the cost of forestation. At the same time, development loans were offered by the Central Bank to stimulate private forestry […]. Meanwhile, State-owned forested areas were passed into the hands of forestry companies. […] The area planted with exotic species went from 576 thousand hectares in 1975 to almost 3.7 million hectares in 2014 […].

Meanwhile, for the people who spent their childhood in areas dominated by forestry operations, the plantations were a place of recreation and fantasy. […] For these generations, the pines are part of their landscape. […]  Similarly, city dwellers, and those people who live in regions further to the north who have never had contact with other types of forest, also believe that these forests are natural. […] [T]hey place new value on these artificial forests. Many of the plantations were located on the western slopes of the Coastal Range, and with time they became forests with a sea view. […]

[T]he natural landscape that has been generated in this sector of Chile’s Coastal Mountain Range is the result of a mechanism of economic production that sought to recover the profitability and productivity of the land […]. In the context of extreme neoliberal economies like Chile, discourses which drive the need for or desirability of natural landscapes appear in fact to accentuate inequality and lead to a distancing from the very objectives of environmentally sustainable development.

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Enrique Aliste, Mauricio Folchi, and Andres Nunez. “Discourses of Nature in New Perceptions of the Natural Landscape in Southern Chile.” Frontiers in Psychology. 17 July 2018.

polynesians: have oral history that references a faraway land of andes-like mountains in the east, cultivated sweet potato (a plant native to central america, not the pacific), literally call sweet potato by the same word used by the quechua and aymara people indigenous to the andes, left physical remains on islands a few km off the coast of chile, have genetic links with native south americans

white academics: hmmm it’s very doubtful polynesians contacted south america.. they probably just stopped permanently at easter island for some reason after systematically navigating the entire south pacific. the sweet potatos floated to them across the ocean

I remembered the capabilities I possess and everything is gonna be okay

How to Cope with Jealous Feelings

1. Understand what jealousy is. It’s a mixture of fear and anger – usually the fear of losing someone who’s important to you, and anger at the person who is “taking over”. Recognise that it’s a destructive and negative emotion - and often nothing good comes out of it.

2. Try and figure out why you’re feeling jealous. Is it related to some past failure that is undermining your ability to trust? Are you feeling anxious and insecure? Do you suffer from low self-esteem, or fear of abandonment?

3. Be honest with yourself about how your jealousy affects other people. Do friends or partners always have to justify their actions and thoughts, or always report on where they were, or who they were with? That kind of pressure is destructive in the end, and puts a strain on relationships.

4. Find the courage to tackle your feelings. Decide to question your jealousy every time it surfaces. That will enable you to take positive steps to manage your feelings in a healthier and more constructive way. Some possible questionsto ask yourself include: “Why am I jealous about this?”; “What exactly is making me feel jealous?”; “What or who am I afraid of losing?”; “Why do I feel so threatened?”

5. Work on changing any false beliefs that might be fueling your jealousy. Start this process by identifying the underlying belief, for example “If X leaves me, then I won’t have any friends”; “If Y doesn’t love me then no-one will ever want or love me”. Understand, that beliefs are often false – and that they can be changed through choice. If you change your belief, you change the way you feel.

6. Learn from your jealousy. Jealousy can help understand ourselves better – and teach us important lessons. For example, it’s natural to feel frightened when a relationship is new, and you don’t yet feel secure. This is normal and commonplace! Also, some people DO have a roving eye, and they may lack commitment in the longer term. Better you know that now, than later on.

7. Work on accepting and trusting yourself. That makes it easier to trust others, too, and lessens our tendency to feel jealous of others.

“I whet my lips to speak your name. To kiss your hands, curling into the posture of prayer, they could almost have been carved from stone. I swear: If idolatry was my only sin, then it’s because god wasn’t watching.”

— Torrin A. Greathouse, from “Ekphrasis on Nude Selfie as Portrait of San Sebastian,” Poetry (vol. 221, no. 2, November 2022)

Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving