Everything is in decay after a summer of growth, leaves falling back to earth here in El Manzano.

What are we doing?

We are a small community in the middle of Chile, on an edge of the BioBio catchment, at the line between mediterranean eschelrofryl and temperate forests, on the edge of the central valley between Los Andes in the East and the mighty Pacific, Humboldt current and Chile Peru trench in the west.

soil beneath my feet

We live on 20 metres of volcanic sand from Antuco, washed by periodic, and probably future, cataclysmic collapse of a glacial lake wall into the central valley. We call it soil, and it is and isnt, andesitic stratovolcano material, pumiscious and ground up by the actions of weathering, glaciation and erosion, transportation by water. It is fertile, at least it holds a lot of mobile nutrients accumulating at the surface, and hydrophobic when dry, leaches with 95% infiltration, gets hot quick up to 50 degress or more, and cold faster, it is easy to dig and missing trace elements, turn it over and the sun will cook it and dessicate in a day or so. It has been slightly modified by plants creating a vulnerable thin layers of soil under forest in places. El Manzano isnt flat, but has only 2 metres of slope in 1000, with some topography to be found where the wind has blown sand into low dunes, and or flood water has pushed it around into mounds and eroded it into shallow streams. Or where it has since been drained and moved by machine.    

water in my veins

This place is awash in water, a very dry place, with 1.5 metres of rainfall in a good year during spring and autumn, with a dry station of 4-6 months depending. We are sitting on top of aquifiers, at various depths, old and young water. We are dependant on irrigation water, flowed many kilometres from the Laja lagoon high in the Andes. We pump our drinking water out of the ground. Rainwater doesnt hang around in the soil, nor doest it runnoff, but drains very quickly into ground water 1-2 metres down, flowing at the surface in small rivers and streams. I have found areas of water storage at the surface where a compact soil layer exists, seen water remaining in the shade almost through summer. In winter water if flowing in streams and drains all around us, held up we imagine by the forests all around and draining out as base flow also through summer. We are worried about water quality from the ground and the skies in this industrial landscape of Chile. This is probably our foremost concern; where to find a safe constant supply of water for drinking and growing food.         

sun on my face

Winter is wet and mild with heavy frosts and long fine still days with brilliant blue skies. Our summer is very hot and dry with a lot of evaporation. Cold dry winds hammer us from the south and south west, relative warm wet northerlies to the north and northwest. We get strange occasional foreign feeling relatively warm and dry winds from the east, blowing in from Argentina. The sand loses heat rapidly in the evenings and induces heavy dew even in summer, and then heavy frost below 0. The last frost is in november and the first in march or april...this year in may. This place is full of microclimate, harbouring thousands of niches. They predict it will be more like the north in the future, a dry desert...who can forecast, let alone prepare. We are witnessing extremes of cold to warm, wet and dry, unexpected and out of the norm...we expect this to continue. 

green friends

This would have been schllerofryl forest not so long ago, we think progressively wiped out and buried by sand, only to restore itself in some form and succeed towards forest again. The area presented a natural barrier, along with the Biobio river, and formed a border between the spanish in the north and indigenous Mapuche in the south for more than 400 years.

This is full of thorny, hardy dry adapted native plants, much of it ´´cleaned´´ to grow stock in the 30´s, and is now Pine tree country, a vast combustible forest set for pulp and low quality logs, and who knows where.

We cultivate a lot of food. Since the family arrived here in the 30´s they have grown a lot of food, mostly self reliant historically. 

There are many of us now, in many places all over the planet, urged to action by the state we see of the world, our deep shared knowing that anotehr way is possible. The networks are growing rapidly.

The global movement is alive and well, rising up to knowing ourselves.