Making Predictable Rivers: Experts, Droughts, and Floods in 20th Century Chile

• In Event: Landscape construction in the modern history of Chile and Latin America. Approaches from animal domestication, technology, and infrastructure.

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary findings from an ongoing study of science, water and climate history in Chile during the twentieth century. The project examines how experts employed by the state perceived, conceptualized, and managed uncertainty as they harnessed rivers for development. Starting in the early twentieth century, state engineers and hydrologists attempted to measure, model and forecast the hydrological cycles of different Chilean watersheds to irrigate crops, produce electricity and contain floods. These pursuits of predictable and stable rivers, however, were periodically frustrated by extreme droughts and floods. Through these extreme climatic events, I explore how scientific understandings of water abundance, scarcity and hazards changed over time, and how such ideas in turned shaped the political and social dimensions of water in Chile.

Author

• Peter de Montmollin, University of British Columbia