Chile 2014: Dinner with a Friend

Max is not just our van driver – he’s a knowledgeable environmentalist, an organic gardener, a seasoned ecotourism guide, and he’s also our friend. Although the group of students changes each year, Max welcomes us as if we were old friends, even those of us getting to know him for the first time. On every step of our journey in Pucon, Max has been there to provide guidance, support and insight into life, ecosystems and culture in this corner of Chile. One piece of Max wisdom is that you can achieve great things through love, caring and respect, and that learning to value one’s environment starts with respecting the people immediately around you. Our dinner as a group was a celebration of the ongoing friendship that has become a valuable part of our students’ Chile experience year after year. Salud!

Next up: Volcano Climb

Chile 2014: Chilling with Nature at Corral del Agua

Our two-night stay at Corral del Agua ranch was a welcome break from technology, with no internet access or cell phone service, and it was a chance to rediscover our more carefree selves in nature. Our activities included hiking to a nearby waterfall, sharing laughter and music around the fire pit, and riding horses through a field bordered by forest and grazing cows. At Corral del Agua, we focused on one of the important concepts of the Introduction to Human Ecology course; to want to preserve nature, it is important to care about it, and one of the best ways to learn to care about nature is through direct contact. So even relaxing, when we’re outdoors, is part of our learning and part of the work we traveled so far to do.

Next up: working on research project and visiting Ojos de Carburgua park.

Chile 2014 : Overnight Hike through El Cañi

by Lindsay Cox

The hike through El Cañi reserve was long and uphill, and could have been very arduous. But we took the advice of Rod Walker, our guide and the father of environmental education in Chile: walk slowly so you have the energy to feel, observe, and maybe take a moment to talk to the person next to you. The breeze introduced us to the fragrance of plant species which were new to our senses, and the birdsong and running water formed a constant yet varied natural music.  In the steep sections, the rhythm of slow walking helped carry us up, and we had time to reflect on our experiences thus far, which have been many in a few short days. Our overnight trip in El Cañi was the culmination of some of the concepts of human ecology we had been discussing– human beings cannot exist separately from nature, there is intrinsic value in exploring our connection to nature, and our connections with other people help us to expand our vision of how we interact with our world.

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Chile 2014: A Glimpse into the Mapuche Culture

by Lindsay Cox

Ruka Kimun was built for educational purposes in the style of a traditional Mapuche home. Historically, families in a Mapuche community would get together and form task groups to complete various parts of the construction – cutting straw, logging, preparing food for the workers – all was done using local materials, sometimes prepared far in advance.

We dined in the Ruka while we chatted with Curi, our guide, who is also a wood carver who creates traditional Mapuche statues. During our tour, we also visited the native forest of Cerro Ñielol, where we learned about medicinal plants and herbs still in use in Mapuche medicine.

To end the day, we visited the greenhouses of a Mapuche women dedicated to collecting and cultivating the seeds of native plants in order to prevent their extinction. It was a fascinating glimpse into one culture’s intimate relationship with its surroundings.

Next up: An overnight hiking trip to El Cañi nature preserve.

Follow all the adventures from the 2014 Landmark College Study Abroad Program in Chile by subscribing to this blog now.

All photos courtesy of Piedrosa Obrera del Arte (Nayade)

Positive Connections

“Positive connections are those moments of clarity when we see the elements of the world around us in balance: when children are happy, not just entertained; when food is good for the soul, not just for the pallette; when our surroundings are full of life, not just superfically attrative; when we laugh from the heart, and feel it.”   KodKod

Dedicated to Human Ecology

“To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people.  There’s no way around it.  We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system.  Their dreams are still their dreams.  What right do I — or does anyone else — have to destroy them?

At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?”

― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

We dedicate this blog to our wise, talented, and inspirational teachers who have taught us the most important lessons about this crucial time in the history of the earth. They have dedicated their lives to putting talk into action, as we will strive to do when we leave here and return to our own communities.  Thank you!

Rodrigo

Alan

Hector

Alexis

Jerry

Clare

Max

Hernan

Ivan

To the Top of the Volcano

“The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—cpower to transform an bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.” ―    Slavoj Žižek

Today we climb to top of the active Volcon Villarrica. The climb is tough and long, but it gives us time to reflect on our studies down here as our stay in Pucon winds down. In the evening we watch a film “180 Degrees South”.  It explores the beauty of southern Chile and tells of the distruction of traditional lifestyles of indigenous peoples there and the spread of pollution of both land and sea through the development of mining, hydoelectric projects, pulp mills, and commercial fishing.  As we gazed into the mouth of the volcano today, we got a true sense of the power of nature over humankind.   Of all we take away from our experience here, the most important lesson is that for the rest of our lives we will embrace nature every day and, as E.B. White instructs, ” taste her sweetness and respect her senority.”

photos by Laurence Freedman, Laith Saffo and Rhea Weinstein

Life in the Balance

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
―    Albert Einstein

Our van driver and park guide Max took us on a hike through part of Villarrica National Park, and we spent a couple of hours swimming in a glacier fed lake.  Our discussions this week have been about the ecology, politics, and scarcity.  We had the opportunity to see a film the other night at Ecole through the generosity of a guest who is bringing a film festival to Pucon.  In the film, a kayaker follows the Colorado River from its source to its mouth, discovering all the water that is drained for human needs in neighboring states as far away as California.  His kayaking ends long before the mouth of the river, because in 1998, after 6 million years of continuous flow, the Colorado River no longer reached the Sea of Cortez.  We observe the nature that surrounds us with a new awareness now–an awareness that unless governments across the globe make the connections between human needs and the capacity of nature to recycle our wastes, our earth is in imminent danger of the greatest mass extinction of life in its history.

The Essential Learning for this Crucial Time

“Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means “to draw out.” What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies.  Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us ‘open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.’ The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.”

David Orr

Today we continue the process of communicating in writing what the education we are receiving from this experience has taught us about ourselves and the communities in which we live.

Into the Mountains

“I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again.  I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.”

Wallace Stegner, American novelist, historian, and environmentalist

The roar was the river that we slept beside and the waterfall we climbed up to and down into during our two nights and three days at Corral del Agua.  Our host Rodrigo Sugg taught us about the origins of  peoples in America’s southern hemisphere, and we walked to a very small Mapuche town center to witness the progress that can be achieved when a community bands together to organize for sustainable development.

The thundering pulse at the base of this falls can only be described as breathtaking multiplied by a million!  It was at the intimidating and totally exhilarating at the same time.  The experience not only reinforced our prior lessons about the power of nature and the need to connect with that power, but helped us reflect upon the force that can build when individuals unite and push for change even in the face of seemingly overwhelming resistance.