When I was growing up in the ’80s in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet dictatorship, air quality was the environmental problem most present in our lives. It determined whether we could drive that day, how overwhelmed hospitals would be, and whether or not we would have physical education at school.

Global warming was unheard of. And plastic was our friend: a cheap, versatile, and durable material that let us play, move about, and simplify our lives. We never anticipated its long-lastingness would become a problem.

During those politically tumultuous years in the country, my childhood was marked by a comforting routine. We still had four recognizable seasons, with gray and rainy winters and long, warm summer days. On Sundays my family ate lunch at my grandparents’ apartment: white rice and turkey topped with applesauce, boxed ice cream and “dulces chilenos” (traditional sweet pastries) for dessert, and Coca-Cola or bottled juice to drink—a special treat reserved only for weekends.

In my household, among my father’s few domestic responsibilities was being in charge of the reusable bottles. I can recall how diligently he kept tabs on them, filling their crate in the laundry room to ensure that each PET (for polyethylene terephthalate) or glass bottle we used found its way back to the market.

In those days, deciding to use returnable bottles was not necessarily driven by environmental consciousness or finances. It was simply how things were done. Buying liquids meant planning ahead, returning empty bottles to our local Almac (short for almacén, or grocery store)—which later became Ekono (económico, Spanish for thrifty), and then Lider (acquired by Walmart in 2009). My dad would insert the bottles one by one into the mouth of a reverse vending machine, and receive a ticket. Then, when he brought the crate, filled with new drinks, to the checkout counter, he would present the ticket and get a discount.

In 1989, Chile had its first presidential election in 20 years. Democracy returned and a new sense of freedom emerged. The country was not only experiencing important political and social changes, but also economic growth that promoted development and consumption. Soon, going to the grocery store became an overstimulating family trip with upbeat music, store specials announced over speakers, and furry “mascots” offering hugs and frightening kids. Previously predictable shelves now showcased new brands, with fancier packaging.

With all the new choices, consumer behavior changed too, spontaneous purchases became the norm to many Chileans, and planning ahead fell by the wayside. The bottle vending machines vanished from supermarkets—supposedly due to high maintenance costs and the need for extra personnel to handle the delicate glass bottles. We began buying single-use plastics. Our family’s old red crate never left the house again.

Plastic was not originally intended for single-use. Marketers promoted Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic invented in 1907, as “the material of a thousand uses.” Its logo was the symbol of infinity. But somehow, the promise of making life easier turned throwaway into a lifestyle.

In the years since, plastic production has sharply increased worldwide, more than doubling over the last two decades to more than 450 million tons annually. It contributes to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, and disproportionately affects marginalized communities living close to plastic production and waste sites. A great deal of plastic waste ends up in the oceans, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that advocates for a circular economy.

On our current track there could be more plastics than fish in the seas by 2050. This waste degrades marine habitats and endangers species. It also poses threats to human health through the food chain, and affects the tourism, fishing, and aquaculture economies.

Currently, 50% of the plastic produced worldwide serves a single-use purpose. If we reused just 10% of our plastics products, we would divert almost half of the plastic waste that winds up in the oceans each year.

Chile, where things are once again shifting, can help show the way. There, in 2012, an entrepreneur named José Manuel Moller brought back the old vending machines—with a new twist. For low-income households in Chile who live day-to-day, non-perishable staples like rice became unaffordable when sold in one-kilogram, pre-packaged plastic bags. Such families had to purchase smaller bags, with significantly higher costs per gram—in effect, paying a “poverty tax.”

To address the problem, Moller’s company Algramo began dispensing products such as rice, beans, lentils, sugar, and laundry detergent into returnable containers, installing vending machines in small local grocery shops to distribute the items. It made the staples affordable. It also helped small businesses and low-income customers reduce plastic waste.

Over the years, Algramo extended its reach from Chile as far afield as supermarkets in the U.K. Recently, Moller received the Champion of the Earth Award, one of the United Nations’ highest environmental recognitions. Chile has further encouraged reuse through new regulations like the country’s 2022 single-use plastic law, which not only prohibits disposable utensils like forks, knives, straws, plates, and cups, but also compels supermarkets and convenience stores to provide and receive reusable bottles.

While working for the Chilean Plastic Pact, part of the Plastics Pact Global Network, which connects national and regional initiatives to implement solutions towards a circular economy for plastic in response to global plastic waste and pollution, I’ve learned that the problem is not plastics, but the way we use them. That is why the goal is to build a new plastics economy that allows this long-lasting material to circulate endlessly, never reaching landfills or littering our oceans. Recycling alone, which reaches only about 9% of the U.S.’s plastic waste, won’t be enough. Reusable packaging is key.

I see glimmers of promise.

In the U.S., nonprofits like Upstream and companies like Blueland are leading the push toward reusable packaging. Last week representatives from 175 countries are meeting in Canada to advance a legally-binding global treaty to end plastic pollution, following previous rounds of talks in Kenya, France, and Uruguay. Reuse standards for global scalability and its possible financial mechanisms should be a central part of the document.

For me, reuse connects me to my Chilean childhood, a time when life was simpler and followed a different rhythm. It’s time to return to the symbolic red crate.

The post Could My Chilean Childhood Combat Plastic Waste? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the Western U.S. and the north of Chile, large-scale mining has produced similar landscapes of extraction: open-pit and underground mines, smelter stacks, and large masonry structures. Transportation networks connected remote places to the world market, while many labor camps evolved into complex and vibrant communities. They also left their footprint on the natural environment: Polluted water and toxic fumes have made many of these sites inhabitable.

No other company left such a strong imprint in the mining regions of the Americas as the Anaconda Copper Mining Company—a “monstruous and complex organization,” in the words of historian K. Ross Toole—whose investments stretched from Butte, Montana to the Chilean desert. As the energy transition and its demand for lithium, cobalt, and other minerals drives a new mining boom, the history of Anaconda’s copper mining towns in Nevada and Chile can help us reimagine a just future not only in terms of how we power our lives, but in terms of fostering sustainable communities.

Though Anaconda’s history started in the late 19th century, much of the contemporary mining landscape dates to the boom that followed World War II, when growing demand, technological improvement, and massive capital investment, drove to increase production across the western hemisphere. As construction became more efficient, engineers spent considerable time perfecting the layout of crushing plants, smelters, and other facilities. At the same time, the company dedicated energy to perfecting the layout of workers’ domestic lives.

In the early 1950s, Anaconda started working in Yerington, Nevada. While many investors had tried to exploit the mines in the area with little success, in just two years, the company started producing cement copper at its new mine about 70 miles southwest of Reno. Isaac Marcosson, a journalist who wrote a 1957 history of Anaconda, called Yerington a “miracle” for transforming a “waste area” into a “productive community.” Its facilities included an open pit mine, metallurgical plants, and a townsite for workers called Weed Heights. Yerington was part of Anaconda’s larger corporate network. The mine required sulfur, which was brought from the Leviathan mine, some 50 miles away on the eastern slope of the Sierras, and its copper was sent to Montana for smelting and refining.

In the late 1950s, Anaconda built a modernist fantasy at 7,500 feet of altitude in the Chilean Andes. Chilean and foreign visitors marveled at the mine’s efficient organization and its perfect layout. While buses transported people back and forth to the mine, the ore moved quickly from the mine to the crushing plants to the concentrator. Before traveling to Anaconda’s elaboration plants in the United States, El Salvador’s copper took its final shape at the Potrerillos Smelter.

The designs of both the Yerington and El Salvador mines reflected ideas about efficiency and modernization that were coming into vogue at the time. In April 1960, Anaconda board president Clyde Weed wrote in the Engineering and Mining Journal that El Salvador was a great engineering achievement made possible by the combination of “capital, technical skills, and modern specialized equipment” and the “willingness of Chilean workmen.”

The mines, however, left permanent scars on the land, “ugly reminders of the visual and environmental price of extracting resources,” in the words of geographer William Wyckoff. In the north of Chile, Anaconda had started dumping copper tailings in the Pacific Ocean as early as the 1930s, destroying the local maritime life and embanking the bay. Yerington closed in 1978, shortly after Atlantic Richfield Company bought Anaconda. Like other abandoned open-pit mines, its pit quickly filled with toxic waste, leaving Nevada and Environmental Protection Agency authorities trying to sort out responsibilities and devise a cleanup strategy.

Workmen from an Anaconda smelter in Montana. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

Despite these environmental tensions, Wyckoff reminds us not to forget that mines “have also been places of work that produced paychecks and built communities.” People fostered a sense of belonging in isolated places and under harsh conditions, building homes even as their lives were marked by backbreaking work, violence, and conflicts.

In the 1950s and ’60s, narratives of technological progress and efficiency also included workers’ living quarters. Historically, mining companies relied on the company town model, whose replicable urban grid and company-run social services promised order that would increase worker efficiency and avoid tensions that could undermine production. But many of the old camps fell short of expectations, and company abuses, control, and material limitations created sparked conflicts and strikes.

The new camps built in the 1950s attempted to remake the company town model by improving living conditions. Anaconda called Weed Heights the “most beautifully constructed and maintained mining camp in the United States”—an attractive place to raise a family, own a home, and pursue the American Dream. Rent was low, and residents could apply for a one-, two-, or three-bedroom house. Built at the height of what the historian Lizabeth Cohen refers to as the “consumer republic,” shopping areas guaranteed residents access to consumption in all forms: restaurants, sports, and recreation. There was also a ballpark, sports courts, and a swimming pool. “Neat” and “order” frequently appeared in the town’s descriptions.

Similarly, in El Salvador, the company’s architects wanted to avoid the “industrial look” and “develop an attractive, modern town that would be a highly desirable place to work and live.” Workers’ duplex houses, made of concrete blocks and painted in pastel colors, contrasted with the arid landscape, while the curved streets gave the illusion of an American suburb. By the late 1960s, the town had about 8,300 residents and, in addition to the curving streets of duplex homes, infrastructure that included a modern hospital, a school, and stores.

The Anaconda era was tainted by its projects of social engineering, its anti-union practices, and impact on the environment. Living conditions were better than those of many other working-class suburbs, but geographical isolation and managers’ control over the living and working spaces created many tensions. In Chile, the Cold War political climate and the attitude of U.S. corporations created sharp divisions between managers and employees. Conflicts were common, and strikes lasted for weeks at the time. In 1971, the Chilean government nationalized U.S.-owned mines, including Anaconda’s properties.

Today, few mines consider building permanent camps or invest in local communities. Instead, they prefer to bus in workers, establish commuting systems, or offer temporary dormitory-style lodging near the worksite. These practices have created new problems, such as long and dangerous shifts and workers isolated from their families for extended periods of time. In places like Chile, the low-income communities that surround mining complexes have become sacrifice zones, areas that are heavily dependent on mining-related informal jobs and commercial activities and that bear the harsh environmental consequences of extraction.

Rethinking mining booms in a time of climate change and job insecurity should start by incorporating input from a diverse array of voices, including labor unions, environmental activists, businesses, and local populations. Only through working closely with communities directly impacted by mining can the transition to renewable energy truly create a sustainable future.

The post Is There Such a Thing as a Sustainable Mining Boom? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The high expectations surrounding Chile, population 19 million, now reflect just how distinct its history and present are. It was the first country in the region to elect a Marxist as president (Salvador Allende in 1970), but also one of the last countries to transition fully to democracy. Its economic reforms made it the toast of neoliberals (Chile has been called “The Tiger of South America”), putting the country on a wealthier plane than Argentina, Brazil, or my home country of Uruguay.

I arrived in Chile in 2003 to take an academic job. Chile wasn’t my first choice, but the economic situation was too dire then in Uruguay and Argentina. Settling in Santiago, I immediately appreciated the higher incomes, the controls on inflation, the growth and sober political leadership. But as I built a family and life here, I’ve come to see Chile as both a challenge to the conventional wisdom that economic growth strengthens democracy, and as a paradox of rising expectations that has yet to be resolved.

The heart of the contradiction is that the economic reforms in Chile—which brought many Chileans out of poverty, enriched some middle-class people, and made some Santiago neighborhoods as glossy as Manhattan—have also stratified society and destabilized democracy. As some Chileans’ economic situation improved and the image of the country as a wealthier place went global, people expected better healthcare, retirements, and other services than governments could deliver. And meeting higher expectations—for more education or a better quality of life—cost more money and produced more debt, leaving Chileans increasingly vulnerable to the international economic shocks of recent years.

The growing spread between expectations and reality has led to rising public anger—and more of a focus on the failures of Chile’s still young democracy and its inflexible constitution.

Chile’s political system provided stability, but not representation or vehicles for change. Chile was divided into 60 districts, each of which elects two members to Congress. That setup effectively made elections predictable; with proportional representation, almost every district elected one member of the ruling party, and one member of the opposition. There was no room for a third party or outside political force to win representation. Over the years, political parties, knowing they didn’t need to talk to voters, lost touch with the street, and politicians became older than the national population. Most Chileans stopped bothering to vote (for example, in the last presidential election of 2017 less than half of registered citizens voted).

A popular explosion of anger was inevitable. The ignition could have been anything. It turned out to be an October 2019 decision by the government to increase the price of subway fares by the equivalent of six American cents. Here was a clear case of an unaccountable government adding to the burdens of citizens. Protests were started by high school students at a subway station, and soon took over the streets, with university students, unions, and unorganized people participating. Police and citizen violence ensued. (One of my students was among the first to be shot.) By November, the military and its tanks were in the streets. I was afraid of a societal collapse.

Protestors were demanding more than a rollback of the subway fare; they wanted a democratic change in the system, and among their requests was a public vote on a new constitution. The inherited charter feels more like a straitjacket rather than a consensual agreement.

The government dealt with the upheaval as a foreign-import movement that tried to destabilize the country. Yet, the public embraced the call with such force that the authorities, who had long protected the system, couldn’t say no.

The pandemic slowed the protests, but the drive for constitutional change continued. In an October 2020 plebiscite, 78 percent of voters supported a new constitution, and 79 percent voted for a completely elected constitutional convention as the way to do it (instead of a mixed body of parliamentarians and elected citizens).

That verdict raised hopes that real change was coming to Chile, and global headlines ensued. But it was only the beginning of a long journey across a democratic minefield, and a new constitution remains far from assured.

One of the main obstacles is all of the different votes that will take place before a constitution can be drafted and presented to voters for ratification.

As I am writing this note, the first complication is evident: COVID. If parliament approves the government’s measures, elections for the convention will be delayed by more than a month to mid-May. Concurrent with Chile’s municipal elections, there will also be a national vote to elect the 155 members of the convention—138 will be elected by districts, and 17 elected by Chile’s Indigenous people in a nationwide constituency.

The election is full of novelties. There are about 1,400 candidates for these convention posts; refreshingly, 80 percent are first-time candidates for office, and nearly half are younger than 40. The slates emphasize independence; among the groups running are “Independents Like You,” “Independents for Chile,” and even “Independents Without Godparents” (a way of saying they belong to no one).

This election also opens the door for a truly revolutionary change. Candidacy lists must be headed by women and then gender is alternated (woman-man-woman-man, etc.). Moreover, parity is a requirement in the results. (If, in a given district of four members, four men are elected, the two men with the least votes will lose their positions in favor of the two women with the highest vote totals in their respective lists.) If this whole process arrives at a safe harbor, Chile will have the first gender-equally drafted constitution in human history at the national level.

The members of the convention will have one year—from mid-2021 to mid-2022—to draft a new constitution. Once they are done, there will be a plebiscite to approve or reject it.

A new democratic constitution could be a game-changer for Chile, especially if it’s short, simple, and allows enough flexibility for elections and democratic politics to spark change within the system. But the situation is risky, and the final outcome on a constitution is deeply uncertain—because of all the elections that are set to happen between now and the 2022 plebiscite.

The May elections for the convention members will coincide with local elections. Then, an already intensive electoral year must be compressed even further. During this year Chileans will also have a second-round vote in elections for regional governors. In July, we will have national primaries. In November comes the general election (for Congress and the Executive). In December is the run-off for the presidency.

Every single one of these elections has the opportunity to raise new conflicts and open up new debates that could undermine support for the process of creating a new constitution. Officials elected in 2021—from the national president to local mayors—may be wary of changing the governing system of the country in 2022. The right wing is already opposed to deeper changes.

And the political inexperience of the convention delegates—so appealing now to a country starved for change—could become a liability. These newcomers might be inclined to draft a document that is ideologically polarizing or makes too many mistakes. The young convention delegates might also be outmaneuvered by more experienced officeholders and interest groups in the 2022 contest over a new constitution. The people themselves—after so many elections, the pandemic, and the popular uprising—could became wary and reject further change.

Conflicts on the streets could also change the political context. Police violence remains a big and polarizing issue; so is illegal immigration and asylum seekers, who are mostly from Venezuela and Haiti. And the country has no single unifying figure, or institution, that has credibility with all the political players. Chile is a minefield, and every step could bring an explosion.

My hopes for this process are fewer than my fears.

I fear greater social conflict in the year ahead. I fear that if our constitutional project fails, Chile will waste this unique high-profile opportunity to remake itself. And I fear that, if adopted, a new constitution will be badly flawed—and might ultimately disappoint Chileans when it doesn’t solve all of our structural problems.

The post A Letter From Santiago, Where Chileans Are Seeking a New Constitution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Likhachev was not the only person who recalled gifts of food during detention. While researching concentration camps around the world, I learned that even the memory of food helped sustain prisoners, linking them to distant friends and family and building bonds between detainees. Through interviews, written memoirs, and even archival “recipes,” the way in which imaginary feasts created community in places that were beyond hope came up again and again, revealing how even in its absence, food defines and shapes the most rudimentary forms of society.

Real food, of course, offered more sustenance than reminiscence could provide. But many concentration camp systems failed to feed prisoners enough to survive, and administrators wielded food as a weapon of control. Enduring forced labor as a teenager at Monowitz—part of Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel described hunger reducing him to “nothing but a body. Perhaps less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.”

Though his experiences were horrifying, Wiesel was fortunate enough to have avoided the gas chamber during selection. But extermination through labor—a combination of brutal work and deliberately limited rations—further culled prisoners assigned to the worst work details. Detainees died of gastroenteritis, pneumonia and a host of conditions that easily took hold as prisoners slowly starved to death.

In these conditions, access to additional food was critical. A post working in the vegetable cellar of a camp, such as the one German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann found in the Soviet Gulag in 1939, could provide a way to expand on the watery soup and bread typically allocated to prisoners. Buber helped to keep herself and others alive with stolen food.

Sometimes prisoners were buoyed by food from loved ones, as Likhachev had been touched by the present of a cake. Held with thousands of other suspects at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, in fall 1973, Felipe Agüero recounted the joy of receiving a care package in detention, but also how the meagerness of what was sent—a few cigarettes or a little bread, maybe some chocolate—revealed that hard times had come for family on the outside, too.

Where they could not scrounge or steal real food, captives turned to their imaginations. Despite the most desperate conditions, concentration camp inmates routinely spent their fleeting idle moments discussing recipes. At Neuengamme, not far from Hamburg in northern Germany, after work in factories, digging in clay pits, or dragging rubble out of bombed-out streets, during the only time they had to try to remain human, detainees talked about their homes and families, their previous lives that had vanished forever, and their favorite meals. They had little else to live on. As the war dragged on, life expectancy for new arrivals at Neuengamme dwindled to 12 weeks.

Shared recipes preserved from this era of camps found improbable publication with In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This 1996 compilation included a series of recipes that had been collected in the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt. A detainee named Mina Pachter had gathered recipes from inmates in the camp and given them to a friend to carry to her daughter, if he found a way to survive. After Pachter died, the collected recipes took more than 20 years to make their way into the hands of her daughter in New York, who eventually decided to publish the instructions for making such dishes as chicken galantine, liver dumplings, stuffed goose neck, asparagus salad, plum strudel, and chocolate torte.

The book was condemned by some who called it “sick,” wondering if cookbooks from Auschwitz or Treblinka would soon follow. The recipes themselves were often missing key ingredients or had completely mismatched measurements that made them useless. Others lauded the publication as Holocaust literature rather than a literal cookbook, a memory of how detainees consoled themselves in humanity’s darkest hours.

More cookbooks emerged over time, but not necessarily for publication. At the age of 12, in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, Nurit Stern listened to adults commune with each other. “Hungry people can only dream about food,” she explained in 2016. “I was a child. I didn’t know anything about cooking. I memorized the recipes and wrote them down.” The small notebook she cobbled together out of stolen materials ended up enshrining the women’s recipes—chopped liver, goulash, stuffed cabbage rolls, and cholent with kishke—for posterity in Yad Vashem’s archive. Stern explained the role the recipes played for people struggling to maintain their humanity. “These women used their memories and imagination to memorize this most basic experience… Many chose this way to protect their sanity.”

Nurit Stern made this recipe book as a child to record the recipes she heard adults discussing in the Ravensbrück camp. (The letters “FKL” stand for Frauenkonzentrationslager, or “Women’s Concentration Camp.” Courtesy of the Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection.

While recipes and fantasies about unlimited food helped detainees endure the everyday horrors of the camps, the issue of food has also been used as a tool of propaganda to keep the public from sympathizing with detainees.

During internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, a series of allegations about detainees being “pampered” in camps centered around food. One New York Times headline from May 1943 reads, “Wyoming Senator Asserts Japanese Go Unrationed and Have Vast Stores of Food.” While much of the U.S. was using ration tickets to buy food, Senator Edward Robinson accused detainees of hoarding meat and mayonnaise in the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, claiming they had enough supplies on hand to feed the camp population for “three years, seven months and fourteen days.” The actual historical record on Heart Mountain, not surprisingly, contains references to late food shipments in insufficient quantities.

The very idea of food for detainees remains a highly politicized subject—partly because detention is seen as a way to punish a targeted group, even when governments deny that punishment is the goal. In 2005, a group of political activists who saw reports on American torture as “military bashing,” assembled a book of their own: The Gitmo Cookbook. Gathering recipes for halal meals including curried eggs, tandoori chicken, and Lyonnaise rice that the Navy had developed to serve those held on the Cuban base, the book’s authors aimed to show just how well detainees in American custody were treated. Nearly a decade would pass before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report verified many of the worst accusations of torture and abuse of detainees.

Why do propangandists feel the need to ascribe gluttony, extravagant meals, or hoarding to detainees? Food is so basic to existence that our common need for it provides the root of our ability to empathize with one another. This empathy lies at the heart of how society functions. When propagandists want to show that those held without trial do not deserve empathy, or are abusing it, they use stories of lavish food as a way to further isolate detainees from society.

A similar principle is at work when prisoners take comfort from the shared ritual of imagined meals. Written and spoken recipes offer a performance of survival when survival is uncertain. They provide detainees the kind of social interactions that camps are typically created to prevent. Sharing the desire for a specific food prepared a specific way further takes the animal impulse to survive and transforms it into art, reasserting the shared humanity of both the teller and the listeners.

Food offers those closed off from society a way to resurrect its ghost behind barbed wire. In China’s Xihongsan Mine labor camp in 1961, prisoner Harry Wu recalled “food-imagining parties.” Inside stone barracks atop a tamped mud floor, Wu described how one person would take a turn, and the next night, another detainee would reciprocate.

Wu was himself altogether ignorant of cooking but joined in, using invention where experience failed him. Before going to sleep, inmates lovingly narrated the creation of a favorite dish, sometimes a secret recipe from childhood or something specific to their home province. “We would explain in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and arrange them on the plate.” Once the dish was ready to eat, the detainee would first describe the smell, and then the taste. Decades later, Wu recalled the spell that was cast. “Everyone,” he wrote, “would listen in silence.”

The post How Concentration Camp Prisoners Found Comfort in Imaginary Feasts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.