Unearthing Low Carbon Futures in the Chilean Central Coast

• In Event: Las transiciones energéticas y su impacto en las sociedades

Abstract

In September 1964, when the industrial park of Las Ventanas was opened in Quintero Bay it was welcomed as a key piece in the Chilean path to development, a strategy based on the development of fossil fuel reliant heavy industries and power generation. More than fifty years later, Quintero Bay is a site of a chronic environmental disaster with recurrent pollution crises and industrial accidents that pose massive health and environmental threats, illustrating the dark side of carbon intensive technologies. The incapacity of successive governments to adequately respond to the crisis have turned Quintero Bay into an economy of abandonment, where the unequal distribution of fossil fuel externalities has been translated into an unofficial policy of letting die. Drawing on ethnographic work and media analysis, this presentation examines community responses that through innovative commoning have contributed to trace alternative development paths for Quintero Bay. A skate park, a human rights memorial and a geopark are used to narrate the trajectories of resistance and contestation followed by Quintero Bay communities enduring abandonment and seeking healthier and dignified futures. The presentation contributes to the understanding of moral contestation and innovative conservation practices in contemporary Latin America as methods for thwarting further carbon intensive development and promoting ethical energy transitions.

Author

• Leonardo F Valenzuela Perez, Independent Scholar