Documenting rubble to shift baselines: Environmental assessments and damaged glaciers in Chile

Introduction

“Making a baseline is like taking a photograph [of nature], to see what is there.” ¹ An engineer in Chile responsible for the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of a large energy project thus described EIA baselines. EIAs are used to vet industrial projects: prior to starting construction on a new industrial facility, the company involved submits scientific studies to state agencies who, after reviewing the documents, issue an EIA license. The studies contain baselines that describe the specific environment where the project would go, and impact evaluations that identify ways to eliminate, reduce, or compensate the environmental harms the project would have. In comparing EIA baselines to a photograph, this engineer was advancing a view of nature as static—it is simply “what is there,” waiting to be captured at this moment in time.

EIAs dominate contemporary environmental management in Chile and globally. Considered a game-changer in 1969, when adopted in the USA (Milazzo, 2006; Spezio, 2018), EIAs reflect the ideal that scientific studies, coupled with public input, will lead to better decisions about the siting, kinds, and conditions of allowed industrial activity (Glasson et al., 2012; Hironaka, 2002). How well EIAs have worked is hotly debated; EIAs integrated environmental review where it did not exist, but critics complain they are often perfunctory, fail to take public comments seriously, misrepresent environmental impacts, and reinforce power asymmetries, among other shortcomings. ² Significantly for this article on baselines, early advocates believed EIAs advanced democracy by forcing officials to consider observations from government scientists as well as non-government actors, including community organizations and indigenous tribes (Caldwell, 1982; Milazzo, 2006). Fifty years later, however, critics complain EIA studies reinforce corporate and state power and obscure important environmental impacts (Fiske, 2017; Goldman, 2005; Kelly, 2019; Kinchy, 2017; Li, 2015; Tecklin et al., 2011). This article explains this gap between the promise and practice by examining the cultural work EIA baselines do.

Baselines are “the ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ reference point for a species, landscape, ecosystem, watershed or climatic zone” (introduction, special issue, 2). This article is part of a special theme on baselines; it adds geographic diversity while illustrating the global dimensions of EIA baselines in particular. Like other baselines, EIA baselines create a framework for comparing environments—in this case, before and after industrial intervention. The metaphor of the photograph suggests an incredibly compressed time frame: an effort to document the present, thus transforming it into the past (Pauly, 1995). As defined by the special theme editors, baselines are instruments used by powerful actors to make a landscape legible and therefore amenable to human control. This is true for baselines with long time frames, such as those used by conservationists seeking to protect coral reefs or savannas from harms occurring over large scales of time and place (see introduction: 3–19, Braverman: 20–39), as well as for EIAs. What varies, however, is the style of remembrance. EIA baselines are not marked by nostalgia or a deep sense of loss that haunt conservation efforts, but by a pragmatic reconciliation between unbounded economic growth and environmental sustainability.

EIA baselines transform the present into the past in ways that normalize a degraded environment (Pauly, 1995). This article extends this insight to argue that this is not a problem for modernity; on the contrary, in normalizing a degraded environment, baselines ensure that modernization and industrial processes are never called into question, and that adding new voices or pieces of data—as EIAs promised to do—does not change this dynamic. In other words, EIA baselines reflect the needs of a society searching for ways to cope with widespread and ongoing environmental degradation caused by everyday industrial activity. Coping happens through faith in the review process and good industrial management, premised on the promise that harms can be appropriately mitigated or compensated. As such, EIA baselines help society remember the present by transforming it into a static past, so that a future society can use that information to hold industry accountable. This article reflects on this achievement and its consequences for environmental management by conceptualizing EIA baselines as a “memory practice,” used in Western societies to create a timeless, universal knowledge of things (Bowker, 2006).

The article is organized in three parts. The first analyzes EIA baselines as a memory practice to shed light on the cultural work baselines do. By recording a timeless past, they perpetuate the illusion of human control over nature and over industry's environmental consequences. Missing from this perfect past is the memory of industry's well-known impacts. The second section extends this reflection through the case of glaciers, specifically those threatened by the Pascua Lama gold mine in the Chilean Andes. Over 15 years, the Chilean state both fought and tried to save the Pascua Lama project through environmental reviews, a new unit to oversee glaciers, lawsuits, and injunctions. In October 2018, Pascua Lama was canceled by Chile's Environmental Tribunal. This case illustrates the politics that goes into “photographing” the landscape and the perseverance of managerial optimism despite moments of doubt among state officials in the logic imposed by EIA practices.

The third section suggests ways to challenge EIA's managerial logic by changing the terms of baselines, from comparing environments before and after the arrival of a new industry to comparing the quality, accuracy, and reliability of EIA documents and managerial promises over time. This section advocates for changing our focus, from recording different natures to scrutinizing the ability of companies, facilities, state officials, and scientists to deliver on the promises made in EIAs. Above all, I advocate for recognizing in EIA baselines the destruction caused by previous development projects; calling this destruction “rubble” (Gordillo, 2014) would force a reckoning with the fact that industry and development schemes have not delivered a linear march towards progress. This article draws on fieldwork the author conducted in 2010–2011 among participants in Chile's EIA system. ³

Industry, memory, and the need to forget

Modernization has always relied on the dream of control over nature as a means for economic growth, promising a linear advance towards “development” (Acker, 2017; Scott, 1998). Particularly in the second half of the 20th century, national governments turned to large capital projects, technocratic policy schemes, and global economic recipes to catch up with the world's most advanced nations. Guided by the promises of modernization theory (Germani, 1969; Valenzuela and Valenzuela, 1978), policy-makers and technocrats embraced linear views of technological change and economic growth. With few exceptions (e.g. Moon, 2007), worldwide, state officials and their supporting networks of experts preferred to design the future with little concern for the ecological and social ills caused by development interventions (Mitchell, 2002; Scott, 1998). In the late 1980s, this triumphalist worldview was revitalized by Francis Fukuyama's (1989) influential argument that predicted uninterrupted progress towards peaceful, liberal, democratic, and consumerist societies. This was “the end of history” according to Fukuyama, a time characterized by the collapse of past, present, and future.

The past in such linear narratives exists to measure progress or, as in Fukuyama's arresting phrase, to be forgotten altogether. A particularly effective way of forgetting is by creating a “perfect past,” perfect not because it is exhaustive or accurate, but perfect to the imagination because it is timeless and constant; this is the work done by what Geoffrey Bowker (2006) calls “memory practices.” In his monograph on the lists, inventories, coins, and other tools used to record, for example, information about historic biological diversity or the value of different goods, Bowker analyzes the various methods Western societies have used to simplify or erase the past, a necessary step in efforts to create an ideal of the eternal present—the end of history—characterized by imminent progress and growth. Memory practices shape how we record information, but also how we describe our role in knowledge-making. This includes the metaphors used to describe knowledge production.

In using the metaphor of a photograph to describe EIA baselines, the Chilean engineer I opened with was acting like the biodiversity scientists Bowker studied. A photograph is a snapshot that holds the past constant; like other memory practices, it creates “background stasis.” Similar statements were made by scientists, consultants, and others working on EIAs in Chile (Barandiarán, 2018: 170–174), Peru (Li, 2015: 192), and Ecuador (Fiske, 2017: 69). In these ways, EIA baselines focus attention on the future. Analyzing an EIA in Ecuador, Fiske (2017: 69) argued that the baseline study relied “on the fiction of being able to stop time.” In a study of NGO-led data collection for a baseline of water quality, Kinchy (2017) argued that baseline data collection channeled activists' attention to the future, convinced that their information would one day help hold polluters to account. These insights reflect the legal role of EIA baselines: as illustrated in the next section with the case of Pascua Lama, baselines set the benchmark against which allegations of environmental harm against a specific facility must be proven in a court of law (see also Hirsch: 40–57).

Yet, EIA baselines seem to regularly obscure or miss certain impacts. Li (2015) notes that the EIA for a large mine project in Peru listed, for instance, only risks to water that could be managed. In Fiske's (2017) analysis, which focused on a purportedly “high-quality” EIA, the baseline established a circumscribed area of influence to narrow down the expected impacts of oil extraction. A recent study of an EIA for a small hydroelectric facility in southern Chile documents how the baseline studies of a river omitted whole groups of users—indigenous communities—and used data that did not apply to this river (Kelly, 2019). Indeed, the relationship between baselines and impact evaluations is complex. In Chile, for instance, on the one hand, great efforts are sometimes made to keep baselines and impact evaluations separate, so as to increase the credibility of the studies, yet on the other, impact evaluations draw on baselines in only the lightest of ways (Barandiarán, 2018). In a 2008 EIA for a hydroelectric dam, for example, consultants stated that the loss of nutrients flowing from the river to the ocean would cause a negative but insignificant impact (Endesa, 2008). The baseline was cited only to say that this coastal area had “no relevant [marine] species” subject to legal protections (Endesa, 2008: 891, chapter 5), thereby obscuring a range of harms to marine fauna and flora from reduced riverine nutrient flows.

What about baselines lends itself to obscuring potential impacts in these ways? Seeing baselines as a “memory practice” sheds light on the cultural work baselines do, specifically how EIA baselines perpetuate deep-seated modernist ideals. This explanation accounts for both society's ongoing commitment to baselines and why certain kinds of impacts are so often obscured. It emphasizes the reproduction of cultural attachments to modernism, and thus differs from other reasons why EIAs so often obscure important environmental impacts. One such explanation has to do with the rise of neoliberal forms of governance, in which state agencies have retreated from playing an active role in EIAs while corporations have taken the lead. In Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and elsewhere, developers seeking an EIA license hire the scientific teams and prepare the final documents; corporations thus identify potential impacts, propose managerial solutions, and undertake monitoring, creating a “self-regulatory regime” (Li, 2015: 199; see also Goldman, 2005; Tecklin et al., 2011). ⁴ A complementary explanation draws on the notion of “scientization” to argue that in EIAs political or normative concerns are marginalized when they cannot be scientifically represented (Kinchy, 2012; Li, 2015).

Society's commitment to baselines is evident given the level of scrutiny these receive from state officials and members of the public, out of a conviction that a comprehensive baseline is necessary for a good impact evaluation (Barandiarán, 2018; Li, 2015). This translates into efforts to improve baselines with new data, ecosystem features that have been left out, better analysis, and the like (Barandiarán, 2018; Fiske, 2017; Kelly, 2019; Kinchy, 2017; Li, 2015). These efforts are, however, misguided. Understood as memory practices, the goal of baselines is not to improve the accuracy of impact evaluations—as liberal values would lead us to believe—but to transform the present into the past to be conserved (Pauly, 1995), thereby enabling new rounds of industrial development.

This requires obscuring the impacts of past rounds of industrial development, a necessary step in efforts to sustain the promises of modernization. This is achieved in two ways. First, like other baselines, EIA baselines capture already incrementally degraded and polluted environments, thus normalizing present conditions which are characterized by environmental deterioration (Pauly, 1995). Research suggests this problem is widespread; a recent study of EIA baseline practices found that “presentist” approaches to scientific methods in baseline studies dominated (Foley et al., 2017). And these criticisms are not new; already in the early years of EIAs, ecologists denounced the use of “helicopter ecology” to superficially capture present-day ecological conditions in baselines (Hilborn and Walters, 1981). As in the case of Pascua Lama discussed next, where since the 1990s glaciers had been degraded due to mining exploration as well as climate change impacts, EIA regulation thus institutionalizes what Pauly called the “shifting baselines” phenomenon: it preserves already degraded environments while erasing any memory of a cleaner or healthier environment.

Second, like other memory practices, EIA baselines exhibit a deep tension between “universality and rooted localism” (Bowker, 2006: 201). What makes memory practices useful to modernity is that they render portable a collection of facts about a particular time and place, while retaining some desired meaning across time and space. This shedding of context and localism is often a necessary step, though with high social costs, in the making of scientific data (Latour, 1979; for a discussion applied to EIAs, see Fiske, 2017; for a discussion applied to development consultants, see Rottenburg, 2009). The corrective many have proposed, including Bowker, is to incorporate more local, traditional, or indigenous knowledge in regulatory and political processes (Gregory, 2017; Li, 2015; Rottenburg, 2009).

However, in the case of EIA baselines, the obscured “localism” pertains to the industrial project—in other words, EIA baselines render invisible not different local knowledge, but global knowledge of industrial pollution, resource consumption, and toxic accidents. The Chilean case is illustrative because regulations there specify the content, format, and even scientific methods to be used in baseline studies (Barandiarán, 2016, 2018). Yet, these regulations fail to account for the fact that most large industrial projects have well-known, widely documented impacts. For instance, the impacts of mining, paper and pulp production, hydroelectric dams, or salmon farming have all been documented by scientists, governments, foundations, and NGOs worldwide. ⁵ Given this experience, when the goal is environmental protection, gathering exhaustive information about a locale no longer seems like the best use of our time and resources. Instead, we would do better to focus on information about the industry.

In short, EIA baselines must normalize progressively worsening present conditions in order to sustain the promise of imminent progress and growth, and they do this by ignoring global knowledge of well-known industrial impacts. For modernizers, shifting baselines are emphatically not a problem to be solved. Normalizing present-day conditions is not a “scandal of knowledge” to be fixed through better government or procedures (Mathews, 2011). Rather, shifting baselines that project a timeless past, thereby erasing memories of ecological destruction, are necessary to the logic of environmental management and its promises to mitigate pollution, prevent accidents, or improve degraded environments. Faith in human's abilities to reconcile economic growth with healthy ecosystems through industry, technology, and smart management would falter if forced to recognize both deeper and global environmental histories. Shifting EIA baselines thus sustain the promise of modernity, providing comfort to societies grappling with the environmental consequences of ever-larger, more intensive and polluting industries (Gordillo, 2014).

That this is so rarely challenged within the regulatory process points to the co-production of political order and regulatory sciences (Jasanoff, 2004); in Bowker's terms, EIA baselines are a site where knowledge and ideology join forces in ways that become routine, and therefore difficult to disrupt (see also Fiske, 2017). To return to Francis Fukuyama's argument, triumphant capitalist, liberal democracy is decidedly managerial; difficult social problems, from inequality to environmental degradation (which Fukuyama's 1989 article ignores), are dealt with through good management. Challenging naturalized routines requires shifting how and what knowledge is produced.

In EIAs, the hand-in-hand focus on the present and the promise of a better future translate into the language of eliminating, mitigating, or compensating the negative impacts of an industrial project. In Chile, compensation typically takes two forms: direct payment to communities—pejoratively described as “buying consciences”—or creating new ecosystems to “replace” those that would be lost (Sepulveda and Villarroel, 2012). Compensating lost ecosystems by creating new ones perpetuates faith in human ability to control and even improve nature through technological progress. Many corporations have seemingly embraced the Anthropocene (see introduction to this special theme), in that they are confidently proposing to compensate ecological destruction by building, for instance, new wetlands to replace those flooded by a proposed hydroelectric dam or a new reservoir dam to replace blown-up glaciers. ⁶ This approach piles impacts upon ecological impacts, with ecological and ethical consequences that receive little attention in EIA evaluations; this at least was the case with the reservoir dam and glaciers at Pascua Lama, discussed next.

Modernization triumphant: The case of glaciers

Glaciers raise challenging questions about what good environmental management might look like, as climate change accentuates water scarcity. Glaciers capture snow and ice and slowly release them as water, thus regulating streamflow in the absence of rain. As climate change advances, mining operations are expanding in glacial environments that were previously unreachable, increasing concerns about vanishing glaciers (Carey, 2010; French et al., 2015). Mining impacts glaciers in multiple ways: explosions and truck traffic release dust, diesel, and other pollutants that can change a glacier's albedo, and operations often compromise the structural integrity of glaciers as roads, waste piles, and other industrial facilities are built on top of them (Brenning, 2008). Climate change and mining are thus accelerating glacier-loss, which means a smaller and less reliable water supply for downstream flora, fauna, and communities.

The dominant logic of EIAs would assess the compatibility of mining with glacier protection through an exhaustive characterization of the time when the EIA studies are being conducted and the place where the mine would go. The case of Pascua Lama illustrates efforts to sustain this logic despite moments of doubt, and how exhaustive local knowledge contained in EIA baselines obscured the bigger picture: global knowledge of industrial impacts. As discussed in the third section that follows, the case also clears a path towards a different way of thinking about the political work EIA baseline knowledge might do to challenge the dominant managerial perspective.

In Pascua Lama's EIA, the company—Barrick Gold—sought to demonstrate with concrete measures, such as the shape of the pit, pollution abatement, specific technologies, and infrastructure, that their activities would not accelerate glacier destruction. The case is admittedly unusual. First, the Pascua Lama mine project was exceptionally complex. It proposed to extract 17 million ounces of gold from a site 5000 meters above sea level, where conditions are ferocious: temperatures are permanently well below freezing and high-speed winds are constant (Figure 1). ⁷ High-altitude glaciers in this area feed rivers that irrigate a fertile agricultural valley below, a fragile border between the hyper-arid Atacama Desert and Chile's (for now) Mediterranean-like central valley. Second, the project underwent two EIA processes which helped galvanize opposition. In 2001, Chile's environmental regulator first issued an EIA permit that allowed Barrick to remove three small glaciers from the pit's proposed area. This was met with public outcry due to myriad environmental harms, but also because of the perceived incompetence of the EIA: the baseline did not catalogue the affected glaciers, and no one believed they could be safely removed. After a long sequence of events (Barandiarán, 2018), in 2006, the authorities modified the EIA permit to require that Barrick access the minerals without intervening or impacting the three glaciers in any way. This time, the EIA baseline studies exhaustively documented the three glaciers in question and others nearby. Third, since 2013, operations at Pascua Lama have been halted, and in October 2018, Chile's Environmental Tribunal permanently canceled it (Antonio de la, 2018). ⁸ Many factors sealed Pascua Lama's fate, including storm-damage, disruptions stemming from at least eight different lawsuits, a volatile gold market, state-issued injunctions and fines, as well as opposition in Chile and Argentina that demanded also national glacier protection laws (Haslam, 2018).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Map of the Pascua Lama gold mine area.

This section analyzes Chilean authorities' decisions regarding Pascua Lama through two documents: a judicial ruling that exonerates Barrick from causing damage to the three glaciers (Environmental Tribunal, 2015), and Chile's national inventory of glaciers, intended to provide a baseline so future EIAs would never again overlook the presence of glaciers near a proposed project. These documents were produced in response to the fall-out from Pascua Lama's controversial EIA decisions. Neither document contributed to the project's demise. Rather, they are interesting because they aimed to extend the project's life, deepening industrial development and providing a glimpse into how judges, scientists, and state officials perpetuated their faith in modernity even when confronted with such a problematic scheme.

Communities know glaciers through largely invisible contributions to the watershed, and climate change is rapidly changing their cycles of growth and loss. Yet, when assessed within the strictures of EIAs, glaciers are made to conform to the demands of capital. While activists ask how to protect glaciers so as to postpone the worst impacts of climate change, some in industry and government wonder why preserve them if they are bound to disappear (Taillant, 2015). In EIAs, these issues are refracted into managerial questions like, can impacts on glaciers be mitigated, eliminated, or compensated? Part of what makes Pascua Lama interesting is that the scientists and consultants who completed its EIA proposed to compensate these impacts by replacing the glaciers with a novel ecosystem, a reservoir. Neither Chile's authorities nor affected communities took this seriously. Exchanges like these demonstrate how linear narratives of change and control over nature triumphed despite moments of doubt and frustration.

The legal case was brought in 2013 by community groups, including local farmers and a national NGO called OLCA, that sued Barrick in Chile's Environmental Tribunal for causing damage to the three glaciers adjacent to the mine. Two reasons the judges used to exonerate Barrick stand out for this analysis. First, the judges argued that particulate matter emissions caused by mining at Pascua Lama were deposited on these glaciers, but without causing negative impacts. Instead, they attributed the steady decline in water quality and quantity (observed in two time-series, for 2002–2012 and 2003–2013) to climate change: analyzing data available to them, they found similar declines in watersheds inside and outside Pascua Lama's area. Therefore, Barrick could not be to blame because the trend lines for Pascua Lama's watershed would be different if dust emissions were causing a problem. Second, although Chile's EIA agency was not on trial, the judges' ruling excused Barrick by laying blame with this agency. According to the judges, the EIA Agency issued an EIA permit that was “difficult to meet” because, in forbidding any interventions to the glaciers, the agency ignored the scientific advice available to it. This advice came from a diverse group of scientists who agreed that the three glaciers in question contributed little to downstream water flows because they were already degraded. ⁹ In their view, it would have been more honest to compensate the loss of the glaciers than pretend they could be saved.

The judges' reasoning is logical within the strictures of the EIA; because the baseline says that the glaciers were already degraded, it follows that the impact evaluation should consider compensation. But can a source of water that provides sustenance through drought and dry summer months be replaced with money or infrastructure? What is reasonable compensation in such a case? How should climate change figure into compensation here? Barrick's scientists and consultants had proposed two measures; the first would mitigate the loss of the glaciers by moving them, so what was left of the ice would eventually find its way into the watershed. The second measure sought to replace the three glaciers with a dam, built to a capacity of five million cubic meters somewhere near the head of the Carmen River (at a lower altitude, where snow is presumably less frequent); like the glaciers, the dam would capture precipitation and slowly release it (Barrick, 2006). ¹⁰ Neither the EIA documents prepared by Chile's EIA Agency in 2006, nor the judicial ruling nearly a decade later, seriously considered this proposal. Admittedly, there was not much to assess; Barrick did not specify the details—the dam's location, environmental impact, useful life, efficiency, or effectiveness—in its EIA documents (Barrick, 2006: 3 of chapter 3 of the second addenda).

That Chile's officials evaluating Pascua Lama's EIA rejected mitigating the losses by moving the glaciers and ignored compensating them with a dam suggests their frustration with a modernist view that privileges technological interventions to prevent ecological change. Indeed, in interviews, officials involved in this decision expressed disbelief at Barrick's proposals. The EIA decision they wrote invoked novel legal norms, including the precautionary principle and the idea that glaciers are part of the “national patrimony,” to justify their decision to forbid Barrick from moving or harming the glaciers (Barandiarán, 2018). And yet, simultaneously, the officials also placed their faith in another managerial favorite: an ambitious plan to monitor impacts on glaciers. Glacier protection and mineral extraction at 5000 meters above sea level were thus rendered compatible through the promise of monitoring.

The monitoring plan, which was later at the center of conflicts among Chile's glaciology community and Barrick and the Chilean state, enables the illusion that the impacts of mining on glaciers can be tracked and controlled. It promises to distinguish impacts from climate change and from mining, so Barrick might be held accountable for this narrow portion of blame in a larger tale of ecological destruction. Between 2006 and 2013, glaciologists disagreed over what to monitor, how to monitor it, and how effectively monitoring could prevent glacier losses. In their ruling, the judges criticized numerous failures in the monitoring plan; both the judges and an expert witness called by Barrick, glaciologist Andres Rivera, described the plan as “poorly designed” (Environmental Tribunal, 2015). The judges rejected Barrick's defense that it is difficult to monitor glaciers at 5000 meters due to the winds, ice, storms, and permanently freezing temperatures. They also dwelled on the inequities the plan created: Barrick controlled access to the site and the monitoring data, and denied access to activists, communities, officials, and non-Barrick scientists. Moreover, the judges recognized an existential threat to the glaciers. They acknowledged hearing the testimony of farmers who used longer time frames, explaining how the glaciers kept their community alive through a devastating drought in the 1960s. They highlighted that climate change demands that state agencies develop better methods to evaluate synergistic, cumulative, and long-term impacts from industrial projects, and consider in particular stronger measures to protect glaciers.

Despite their awareness of these issues, and following the example set by EIA officials before them, the judges concluded by doubling-down on actionable goals like crafting a “better” monitoring plan to ensure “the maximum possible accuracy and credibility of glacier and ice monitoring information, making it publicly accessible and transparent so as to improve its management and enforcement” (Environmental Tribunal, 2015: 163). In other words, they told Barrick to overcome the obstacles posed by brutal weather conditions at 5000 meters and revived the idea of a replacement dam. Their message was clear: despite climate change, brutal weather conditions at high altitudes, and a decade of botched operations at Pascua Lama, absolute control over nature could still be accomplished by Barrick and their experts.

Chile's national inventory of glaciers

Belief in the power of baselines drives also the Chilean government's national glacier strategy, which states that “precise knowledge of the current state of Chile's glaciers is key to efforts to predict, project, and model future glacial movements, freshwater contributions, and economic and ecosystem services they may lend to the country's development” (Glaciology Unit, 2009, online). Started after Pascua Lama's controversial EIA evaluations, the goal of the inventory is to improve glacier protection within EIAs. Reading the inventory as a baseline illustrates several themes described in this article.

First, like EIA baselines, the inventory reinforces the idea of metaphorically photographing a nature “that is already there” and, by way of the photograph, naturalizing that moment in time. Made between 2010 and 2014 and accessible online, Chile's national glacier inventory consists of an ArcGIS map with different base layers (e.g. topographic, light gray canvas, streets). Glaciers are marked with gray polygons and organized by watershed. Clicking on the polygon reveals a box with information on, among other things, the data source, GPS coordinates (fundamental for linking mapped glaciers with proposed mine sites), and—in most but not all cases—the year in which the image was taken. Different watersheds were mapped in different years: for instance, the information for the Maipo river watershed (near Santiago) is from 1973, while that for the Huasco river (part of Pascua Lama's watershed) is from 2004. No information is provided on the time of year when the images were taken (e.g. winter when snow is plentiful, summer when it is not). The inventory provides one image per glacier, making them appear to be static objects, photographed once in some (random) year (Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Image from the National Glacier Inventory of the area near Pascua Lama. Information for Toro 1, one of the three most-impacted glaciers, is shown.

Second, available accounts of what goes into making glacier inventories belie the notion that documenting “what is there” is innocuous or straightforward. Activist and scholar Jorge Taillant (2015) documents the multiple struggles for control that went into making glacier inventories in Chile and Argentina after Pascua Lama. What role activists, citizens, consultants, and other groups should have in contributing images to such inventories and accessing information was highly contentious. Chilean glaciologists disagreed whether scientists alone should contribute data to the inventory (as was done in Argentina) or if consultants should take the lead (as was done in Chile). The question had to do with the credibility of the data: could consultants who depend financially on the mining industry be trusted to provide accurate and comprehensive data? (see also Barandiarán, 2018). Glaciologists also disagreed on what imaging technologies to use. ¹¹ Additionally, many wondered, should these images be verified with satellite images, fieldwork, or both? Snow and ice can be difficult to distinguish, particularly in satellite images taken in winter or spring.

These are not esoteric questions; rather, as evidenced by the judicial ruling discussed earlier, they are central to efforts to regulate and protect nature. The judges dedicated significant attention to weighing competing data presented by an NGO against that of a well-paid consulting group, BCG of Toronto, Canada. The judges accepted BCG's arguments against the NGO's data, dismissing it because it was based on largely undated, publicly available photographs that captured conditions at different times of the year (Environmental Tribunal, 2015: 111, 149). Yet, these same conditions would affect anyone relying on the Chile's national glacier inventory, whose data—echoing BCG's criticisms—make comparisons over time and across watersheds impossible. This is reinforced by the only report issued to date by Chile's glaciology agency about the inventory, which provides no contextual information to aid citizens wanting to use the inventory. The 97-page report provides beautiful images of glaciers and, for a handful of these, data on falling surface area (Figure 3). But there is no justification of why these glaciers are reported on and not others, nor is there information on who collected the data and how; how and when the inventory will be updated; or recommended uses of the information. Tellingly, a recent Congressional report does not reference the state's national inventory, preferring instead information produced by a private research institute (Congreso Nacional, 2016).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

The Tapado glacier in Chile's dry Andes, which since the 1950s has lost 67% of its area.

In short, the inventory and its usages to date fall short of the goals of predicting, projecting, and modeling future glacial movements and freshwater contributions. Like EIA baselines, the inventory captures a snapshot of nature that naturalizes the present. Far from an excess of remembrance, the beautiful images in the 97-page report glorify a fragile present to be managed through science, technology, and capital.

Documenting rubble to challenge modernity in EIA baselines

What follows suggests two ways by which to challenge baselines that act like memory practices, perpetuating linear views of change. The goal is to make EIA baselines simultaneously more historical—rather than a snap-shot-in-time—and forward-looking (Alagona et al., 2012), so as to institutionalize greater humility about humans' abilities to improve nature or control industrial damages for the environment. These measures can complement activists' strategies, such as disrupting baseline data collection (Barandiarán, 2018), protesting participatory meetings (Li, 2015), and demanding more legally empowered participation (Aguilar-Støen and Hirsch, 2017). These measures instead ask different questions to shift the kinds of knowledge produced in EIA baselines. This shift could be undertaken by scientists, consultants, and officials who are willing to re-think their work and the role of EIAs in environmental protection; or it could be led by activist networks to challenge the modernist, managerial logic that currently drives environmental licensing.

Making baselines more historical carries some risks, as other contributions to this volume highlight. Environmental historians have documented a tendency to romanticize nature's past, often in ways that have been instrumental to colonizing or paternalistic “improvement” projects (Alagona et al., 2012). As noted by Braverman (20–39) and Hirsch (40–57), an “excess” of remembering can hamstring baselines in conservation efforts, opening up thorny questions like, how far back should a baseline go and whose accounts of past change should be privileged? Set a baseline too far back, and everything in nature has changed, thus obscuring changes that matter today to human, animal, and plant health. Baselines can normalize existing pollution and toxicity, either due to a concerted strategy to obscure industry's responsibility (as in Kinchy: 76–94) or as a result of scientific practices (Ureta, 2018). Many skeptics use the fact that environments are prone to change to dismiss concerns with pollution, toxicity, resource depletion, and other negative changes as irrational or misinformed (Fiske, 2017). A more historically grounded baseline risks playing into these strategies and does not by itself guarantee more just outcomes in EIA decisions.

For these reasons, the two strategies I offer pose a different tactic. ¹² The first approach shifts the focus from comparing natures to comparing assessments of nature, that is, the reports that constitute EIAs. At first sight this seems simple; rather than conflate nature with depictions of nature, this approach recognizes scientific reports for what they are: representations of nature. Thus, scientists must abandon the idea that baselines are “like a photograph” that can be captured through, for example, the maligned methods of “helicopter ecology” (Hilborn and Walters, 1981), and recognize instead the work of baselining (Ureta, 2018). As outlined by Ureta and other contributors to this volume, making baselines involves judgment calls that distinguish “natural” from “anthropogenic” change, render some samples “representative” but not others, and black box the relationships that constitute ecosystems. This approach requires that scientists and the public alike recognize that scientific practices shape the representations of nature that result from those efforts.

In practice, however, this approach represents a profound legal and cultural shift because it holds scientists and consultants legally accountable for their work, alongside the responsibilities of industry which are ostensibly already codified in law. This is achieved by comparing EIAs over time; as stated by Hilborn and Walters (1981: 274), “it should be a requirement of [every EIA] that exhaustive surveys of past actions similar to those proposed be done, and that the proponents discuss why their proposals won't have the same problems.” In other words, rather than describing an existing nature, scientists and consultants would account for why the project under assessment would perform better, from an environmental point of view, than past efforts. Rather than distract the public with debates about the nature of environmental change, this shift would focus attention on questions like, what did past EIAs for a similar project get wrong, and with what environmental consequences? What will be different this time? This kind of analysis would expose past mistakes, misguided promises, and system failures and foster a healthy questioning of the power of environmental science to control industrial impacts. This view recognizes EIA baselines as anticipatory, and therefore inseparable from the practices of impact evaluation (Hirsch: 40–57). In short, this approach forces scientists and consultants to revisit their past work, recognizing human mistakes, in a publicly accessible and legally weighty document.

The second disruptive strategy gives a powerful name to past industrial mistakes, false promises, and system failures: rubble (Gordillo, 2014). ¹³ I use the term in both a literal and conceptual sense to “highlight the dislocations caused by new forms of [industrial] production” (Barandiarán and Walsh, 2017). In comparing the EIA they are working on with past EIAs, scientists and consultants would be required to identify the “rubble” left by past industrial projects as a reminder of the high social, economic, and environmental costs of development efforts. Baselines thus would not document some illusory, untouched nature nor a landscape that might be improved through development, but the real, lasting, and often disruptive impacts of past human interventions. In documenting rubble, EIA baselines would record for the collective our litany of past technological and economic failures. In trying to anticipate the forms of rubble a new project may leave behind, EIAs would hold new industrial projects to a higher standard, one that institutionalizes concern for future generations—rather than pass the buck to them by asking them to hold future industries accountable for harms they cause today. Every EIA would thus have a new required section: in the baseline documents, scientists would identify what rubble is already there, and in the impact evaluation documents, they would anticipate what kinds of rubble this project might produce.

The power of rubble as a concept lies in that it challenges the spectacle of modernity and capitalist accumulation by highlighting the disruptions, reversals, and struggles involved in development (Gordillo, 2014). By contrast to the term “ruins,” used to celebrate such disruptions and create a sense of continuity between past and present, the term rubble is neither celebratory nor linear. Instead, it highlights the cycles of boom and bust that have characterized capitalist development. For example, seen as rubble (which is what it now is, see Figure 4), the Pascua Lama mine gains an ecological permanence that reinvents past conflicts in the present and future. The open pit, the water catchment system, the piles of waste and sterile rock, and the icy remnants of glaciers are all now rubble left over from capitalist development and technological hubris. Seeing the now-abandoned mine as rubble calls attention to the inequalities mining technologies produce and the durability of past forms of extractive development for societies (Gerhart, 2017; Partridge, 2017). Had Pascua Lama's scientists and consultants been asked to identify in the EIA what forms of rubble the project would leave behind, they would have had to grapple with the question, what life forms will survive this pace and type of environmental change? (Barandiarán and Walsh, 2017). In this case, the survival of the glaciers and the life-forms that depend on them—from those microbial in size to large agricultural systems—is in doubt.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

The Pascua Lama mine (the light area at the center of the image), captured by satellite image as part of Chile's national inventory of glaciers.

Conclusion

Global capitalism and climate change together mean that new industrial projects are bigger and more intensive than before and located in more fragile, marginal, or degraded environments than before. Sustaining the promise that more industry and large infrastructure projects will deliver welfare has become harder as communities remember the dislocations caused by the development projects of the 20th century. This is the task that EIAs, specifically the baselines within them, face today. Functioning as memory practices, EIA baselines sustain the promise of imminent growth and progress in contemporary regulation. Monitoring and the notion of compensating environmental losses with novel ecosystems only perpetuate the ideal of human control over nature.

This article suggests a corrective to institutionalize greater humility into EIAs: scientists and consultants should document the forms of rubble similar projects have left in the past and anticipate the forms of rubble the project they are working on might leave in the future (Gordillo, 2014). Recognizing rubble disrupts linear notions of change. Rather than creating a perfect, static past, as EIA baselines do, recognizing rubble admits upheavals, cycles, and failures, as well as their enduring effects that shape our present and future. If this corrective generates discomfort, then it is de-naturalizing the strength of our commitments to modernist ideals of economic growth and upsetting the regulatory routines that sustain them.

Highlights

EIAs are used globally to identify the potential impacts industrial activity may cause.