Chiloe Island, Chile -- Combine Mendocino, California, and Eugene, Oregon, in the late 1970s, add a very strong indigenous presence, and you have a sense of the island of Chiloe today. It's as rainy as Eugene, with coastal Mendocino's old fishing and whaling influences. This is the last stronghold of the Mapuche, who drove the Spaniards out once and then held the Chileans at bay for the entire nineteenth century. Today this archipelago blends Chile's counterculture with a relatively new extractive economy -- logging and salmon farming -- and the memories of an older one based on fishing.
Outside my hotel windows, men gather razor clams at every low tide and, on the waterfront, farmers from the highlands across the Gulf of Ancud bring sacks of potatoes to sell. But the old wooden Chilote fishing boats are gone, and it's salmon farming that has brought this region whatever prosperity it has ever known. Chilotes no longer emigrate en masse to work as gauchos and farmhands in Argentinean Patagonia, where Bruce Chatwin found them In Patagonia.
The other extractive mainstay is logging. Here, at least, logging of the native forests has been banned, and pulp and wood products come from plantation eucalyptus and pines. Grocery store shopping bags are made of biodegradable corn-starch blends, and the town of Castro hosts an Ecology Center, although its hours are irregular. The young hitchhikers we pick up are returning from a "moon festival" on the beaches of Chiloe National Park and have Jamaica and Ethiopia at the top of their world-travel wish list.
If environmentalism is going to take cultural hold in Chile, this island seems the most likely incubator. This country has already set aside a full ten percent of its area in nature preserves. So the stunning indifference to air pollution in Santiago and around the copper smelter at Concon are just part of the complex equation of Chile's relationship to its own future. And Chiloe may hold the key.