Infrastructure and water management in the Patagonian desert: five moments in a landscape history

FERNANDO WILLIAMS

Tucson, Arizona

Conferencia; Global Deserts: Environmental history in the Arid Lands; 2015

Rachel Carson Center (Munich, Alemania), University of Arizona (EEUU)

Patagonia, writes Chris Moss, is the ?ultimate landscape of the mind?, a region that up to this date is surrounded by a set of associations related not only with geographical extremity but also with emptiness and vacancy. Even before Darwin visited its coasts and described its plains as ?pronounced by all most wretched and useless?, Patagonia had long been known as a desert.Initially applied to both the Pampas and Patagonia, the term ?desierto? had an undeniable cultural and political productivity in 19th century Argentina. The ?conquest? of this desert not only led to a reshaping of the new national state, it also consecrated Patagonia as a region where the nascent nation could be refounded. A set of policies ?from the agricultural colonization of particular areas to regional scale development plans- have been implemented over the last century and a half. Needless to say, the water resource and its management has been a key issue in this long territorial history. So was infrastructure, without which the provision of water would be scarce in a region made up of more than 1 million square kilometers of semi desertic plateaux.The aim of this paper is to draw an historical outline of the different ways in which water has been understood, managed and recreated in desertic Patagonia. Since it will be impossible to cover the whole of the region over such a long period of time, the outline will be based on five different moments, each of them representing a change of paradigm in the use of water.A first moment will deal with an inaugural experiment regarding irrigation and agriculture: the one developed by a group of Welsh colonists who settled in the Chubut river valley in 1865. The privately owned and cooperatively managed irrigation system that the Welsh created was an unprecedented experience in Argentina especially when it comes to water legislation. It is precisely, the first national irrigation law, passed in 1909, what leads to both the second and the third moments. By means of this piece of legislation, railways were given a central role in the colonization of Patagonia, allowing a British railway company to receive the commission to build a series of irrigation works which transformed the Negro river valley into a fruit producing oasis. A third moment deals with the first hydrological survey of the region carried out by the American geologist Bailey Willis, as part of the promotional policies implemented during the same period. Some of the conclusions of the survey anticipate the centrality that river basins will have for regional planning in the postwar era. The fourth moment, therefore, deals with a series of hydroelectric projects constructed along the rivers that form the Comahue basin. A fifth and final moment explores the impact of what seems to be the irreversible decline of large river dams and attempts to establish a comparison between ongoing projects in Argentina and Chile.In drawing this outline, the present paper seeks to cover and connect two otherwise disparate aspects: the socio-political implications of different territorial management models and the cultural and even aesthetical values of a wide array of territorial representations (photographs, maps, etc.) and territorial devices (artifacts, networks, etc). The work carried out for this paper is part of ?Fluvial South America: a history of the relationship between infrastructure, cities and landscape during the 19th and 20th centuries?, a research project directed by Dr. Graciela Silvestri at the HITEPAC-FAU-UNLP in La Plata, Argentina.