Sustainability is our needed destiny, was written on the napkin and paper cup provided by the flight attendant on our flight from Santiago to Concepción. It refreshed in my mind the reason I was visiting Chile one more time. Chile is a little over 2,650 miles long, and that is only 70 miles shorter than the distance from Miami to Seattle. It is also quite narrow with an average 110 miles wide, similar to the width of the state of Florida crossing over Orlando. The one hour and ten minutes flight was smooth with no turbulence, blue sky and most passengers enjoyed the beautiful views of the snowcapped Andes on the left side of the plane and the blue Pacific Ocean on the right. And the text on that cup and napkin reminded me what I am doing as part of Auburn University Water Resources Center, and most of all, made me think about my daily routines, and my personal beliefs, choices and goals in what I have left to live.
Sustainability is a beautiful term. A word that maybe too many people try to use, and often is misused today; but that somehow also reminds me of the word capitalism. Sustainability as well as capitalism are definitely very complex concepts, but giving them more thought, they seem to have a few things in common. A similarity could be the fact that the US culture seems to want the whole world to embrace capitalism, and at the same time that everybody should also embrace sustainability. Sustainability can be seen as a matter of ethics and morality, as capitalism should be, but it is not. Capitalism, as we have it, turns humans into self-interested and self-centric individuals. It causes humans to constantly demand for more and more and there is no end to their wants. Yet, the ecological and social risks of capitalism are real and have reached a dangerous point of no return. It is quite possible that both, capitalism and sustainability, may fail if more and more people lose sight of compassion and limits, of ethics and morals; of the fact that the world’s resources are not infinite, and of the need to accept that at some point, enough should be enough.
The second and third week of October I had the opportunity to take a short vacation to visit, for the third time, the beautiful and marvelous South American country of Chile. Chile is without a doubt a land full of amazing ecosystems but also of much art and plenty of history. I was introduced to Chilean culture in the late 70s, the very first year I started attending the Center for Marine Studies and Aquaculture of the University of San Carlos in Guatemala. One of the faculty members, Dr. Francisco Orellana was Chilean and immersed us in Chilean culture and inspired me to dedicate my life to natural sciences. And through him we started listening to the music of Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Inti Illimani, Quilapayún, Tito Fernandez, and many more. Chile is the land of many amazing writers, and in the old days we were introduced to poets like Jara and Parra mentioned above, and Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, both winners of the Nobel Prize of literature. Dr. Orellana conversations also provided more meaning to the Chilean poems we had to memorize in school, which decades later still resound in my mind:
That translates into this: I like you when you are quiet because it is as if you are absent, and you hear me from far away, and my voice does not touch you. I like you when you are quiet because it is as if you are absent. Distant and in pain as if you had died. A word then, a smile is enough, and I am happy, happy that it is not true. An of course there are some words of Neruda that can easily connect with sustainability, like when I change the word “love” for “earth” on this one: “Do not do with earth what a child does with a balloon; when he has it he ignores it, and when he loses it he cries.”
Since our first contact in 2021, GWW partner in Chile, Fundación Manzana Verde (FMV) have been working 24/7 taking community-based watershed stewardship to the next level in many communities in the country. This time, our first journey in Chile took us back to Laja, the city that breathes and lives thanks to La Señoraza lake; in fact they revere it. The two-hour train ride from Concepcion to Laja, along the shores of the Biobio River, is a relaxing and unforgettable adventure. With a few short stops at lovely small towns and with the magnificent Biobio all the time on the right side; the time seems to stand still, and at the same time to pass too fast. Soon our train was crossing the bridge over the Laja River, within sight of the much larger Biobío River, in fact, very close to where the Rio Laja enters the Biobio. It seemed like we had just blinked and suddenly, we were walking from the Laja train station to the Liceo Héroes de la Concepción, in the City of Laja.
A dozen students, a teacher and several community members, certified last year as GWW monitors, have been monitoring at three locations in Laja. They all got reunited again at this local school to attend recertification. Chilean GWW trainers DR, EF, and OC traveled with me to conduct a classroom session with questions and answers about the three types of monitoring; and also to visit La Señoraza lake and the small creek flowing from it, to observe the local monitors conduct every test from the water chemistry kit as well as to practice bacteriological monitoring.
After a delicious lunch all participants moved to the Laja River to practice stream biomonitoring. The river was a little flooded forcing the practice to happen only near the shores and in more shallow waters. Nevertheless, everybody enjoyed observing the macros collected, plus some small fish also caught with the biomonitoring nets. Six new students highly interested in science, participated in all activities and will be certified next year to officially be part of the GWW monitors in Laja and integrate in the ongoing collection of long term citizen monitoring water data.
Friday we got up early to ride to Tomé, the city where GWW-Chile has been holding training sessions and many other environmental education activities. The local municipality has been a model collaborator and sponsor of GWW trainings; including the one in November 2023, when municipality employees and local teachers were encouraged to get certifications in water monitoring. This time the classroom activities were held at the Bellavista School gymnasium, with the participation of almost 50 new monitors. Field practices took place at the Bellavista River, which is a perfect location for accommodating large monitoring workshops for its water quality and biodiverse macroinvertebrate fauna.
Sunday, October 13, 2024 about 30 more monitors from other locations in Chile joined the gathering in what was considered the first annual meeting of GWW-Chile. There were social activities, speeches, delicious food and sharing of numerous monitoring stories.
Usually people do not value what they do not know, and they do not preserve what they do not value. That was a statement said by one of the presenters at the IV Meeting of Protected Areas and Gateway Communities, an event organized among others, by the Protected Rivers Foundation. Gateway communities are all those localities, physically or culturally, close to a protected area. Today about one third of Chile’s surface is protected under some form of land and marine protection. About 200 attendees participated in the event held at La Moneda Palace, a historical building that houses the president of the Republic of Chile and other ministries. FMV Débora Ramírez as part of the Coalition for Protected Rivers working team was recipient of an award for their work. FMV Esteban Flores, spoke about the GWW-Chile initiative to expand participatory community-based, science-based watershed stewardship and water monitoring, as part of a panel. On the second day of the meeting, E. Flores moderated the panel Citizen Science to Protect Water Bodies, where I participated along with D. Ramírez, Juan Vera and Sandra Cortés. Dr. Cortés is a Pontifical Catholic University of Chile professor and president of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Climate Change, recently formed by the Chilean Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation. She specializes in the study of climate change and its impact on public health.
I was assigned to respond to questions about citizen science, citizen data credibility and validation, and quality assurance-quality control plans. Additional information discussed included how GWW started and highlighting success stories of GWW work in the US, the Philippines, Mexico, Peru and even in the relatively new GWW-Chile. I took the opportunity to remind the participants about what a speaker at the event said the previous day: “Tomorrow Chile can be a model for sustainability”, and I told them today “why wait, we must start today”.
After a few days in Santiago, we traveled to the coastal town of Santo Domingo, Valparaiso province, to conduct an environmental education activity with 24 students and two teachers from the Colegio Pucaiquén. After initial introductions in the classroom, we all went outside to start the activity with a variation of the game Macroinvertebrate Mayhem, which provides a meaningful opportunity to take learning about aquatic invertebrates outdoors, and helps participants to understand how macroinvertebrates are used as bioindicators. Every student was provided a card printed with a macro and information about the feeding habits and pollution tolerance of that macro. GWW categorizes macros in three groups: Group 1, very sensitive to pollution, Group 3 quite tolerant, and Group 2 which tolerate a wider range of conditions. Three participants were assigned the role of “point and nonpoint source pollution” that would enter the narrow area designated as the “river channel” where all macros were living. After three rounds of pollution waves, participants experienced in a very tangible way how the distribution and diversity of macroinvertebrate species was affected over time.
MacroMayhem was a big success, and it was supported with a comprehensive introduction to the nature of macro-invertebrates and their role in assessing water quality. Back inside the classroom the concept of watersheds were introduced with the making of a 3-D map using a piece of fabric, cotton/wool yarn of various colors, and other handy materials and objects. Teachers and students were thrilled when the environmental education activity ended with a demonstration of water testing and the magic of pH testing and acid pollution.
GWW US-based traveler conducted one last activity before departing Chile, visiting the Municipal Natural Preserve (RENAMU for its Spanish name) in the town of Peñaflor, a commune of the Talagante Province in central Chile’s Santiago Metropolitan Region. Peñaflor is about 40 km SW of Santiago, and we demonstrated stream biomonitoring and water chemistry testing in the Mapocho River that runs through the preserve. The Mapocho River was flowing relatively high with a strong sewage smell, which RENAMU leaders said comes from municipal outflows about 7 km upstream. Obviously, very few macroinvertebrates were caught, mostly midges and aquatic worms. Contrastingly, sampling a small tributary flowing into the Mapocho about 20 m upstream from its mouth, yielded an excellent biotic index of 23, with numerous Group 1 (4) and Group 2 (4) macros.
The overnight 4,700-mile trip back to Atlanta was peaceful; I slept most of the way and as the sun was rising I woke up and returned to the normality of the US, greeted by the headline of “3 killed and 8 injured in a mass shooting after a homecoming game in Mississippi”. Another normal day in the self-proclaimed world leading USA. Sometimes it is disheartening to realize that while some of us keep trying to help the planet through citizen science and environmental education, it is hard to hide that unfortunately many others have their priorities on different issues. As part of the AUWRC we will just continue doing as much as we can and want, bridging the big gap that exists between the way nature works and the way people think and act. Every day every one of us should reflect on our common sense of goodness and rightness, of compassion, ethics and morals, in our relationships with each other and our relationships with the earth.
GWW-Chile is rapidly growing and the interest and commitment of each new monitor is inspiring; there are now almost 250 certified monitors, regularly testing in almost 100 sites distributed from San Pedro de Atacama to Futaleufú. And the interest for GWW monitoring has reached as far south as Puerto Williams, basically at the tip of the American continent. ===============================