For eight million years, the Atacama Desert in South America has allowed a unique ecosystem in the world to thrive. Now the driest desert on earth is threatened not only by lithium mining, but also by the waste trade. Mountains of old clothes and shoes and endless rows of discarded tires and scrap cars are already disfiguring parts of the desert in northern Chile.
“We are no longer just the local backyard, we are the backyard of the world,” said Patricio Ferreira, mayor of Alto Hospicio, one of the country’s poorest cities.
“We need to find those responsible”
Chile has long been a hub for used and unsold clothes from Europe, Asia and the United States, which are either resold in Latin America or left to rot in desert landfills. Due to the insatiable global drive for fast fashion, more than 46,000 tons of used clothing ended up in the Iquique free trade zone in northern Chile last year.
Old clothes are full of chemicals and take up to 200 years to break down, activists say. In this way it pollutes the soil, air and groundwater. Sometimes the piles of clothes are set on fire to get rid of them faster.
“The material is highly flammable, the fires are toxic,” said lawyer Paulín Silva, who has filed a lawsuit in the country’s environmental court over the damage caused by imports of scrap metal and old clothes.
“We have to find those responsible,” the 34-year-old activist demands as she stands amid piles of old clothes. From their point of view, this is “an environmental risk, a danger to human health”.
Science sees great possibilities
Copper and lithium are also intensively mined in the Atacama Desert with its impressive beauty and extensive salt flats. Carmen Serrano, director of the Raices Endémicas (Native Roots) environmental organization, says most people see the Atacama as “barren hills” that they can “exploit or get rich from.”
For more than eight million years, the 100,000 square kilometer Atacama has been the driest desert in the world. It rarely rains, never in some parts. Yungay district near Antofagasta is the driest. Researchers have found extreme life forms here, microorganisms that have adapted to an almost waterless environment with a lot of solar radiation and few nutrients.
Scientists believe that studying these microorganisms could lead to insights into evolution and survival on Earth and other planets. NASA considers Yungay to be the most Mars-like landscape on Earth and uses it to test its robotic vehicles.
Although it doesn’t rain much, fog banks sweep across the desert near the coast, allowing some plants and vertebrates to survive. Some of the world’s hardiest lichens, fungi and algae thrive here.
Numerous colorful varieties of wildflowers, especially purple, bloom in a spectacular carpet of flowers every five to seven years when rainfall is above average. Their seeds can survive in the sand for decades while waiting for a bare minimum of water.
“Land Will Be Sacrificed”
It is an ecosystem that is “very fragile because any change or decrease in rainfall or fog has immediate consequences for the species that live there,” explains Pablo Guerrero, a researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB). “There are cactus species that are thought to have gone extinct due to pollution, climate change and human habitation. Unfortunately, we see this on a large scale and in recent years it has gotten progressively worse.”
Mayor Ferreira says: “We feel that our country is being sacrificed.” He laments a “lack of global awareness, a lack of ethical responsibility,” adding, “These are unscrupulous people from all over the world who come here to dispose of their garbage.” He is powerless in the face of the problem. “We cleaned once, but then they just leave their dirt a bit further.” (AFP)