Analyze

Despite the current level of development of communications, which has managed to connect distant geographies in high quality of image and sound, the possibility of traveling and seeing people and places is still an amazing experience. It is therefore not surprising that, despite the crisis that the aviation and tourism industry experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of flights has increased today. However, these trends are in contrast to the climate crisis scenario in which air mobility appears as one of the main contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore worth asking, what factors sustain this scenario and invite us to continue to prefer aircraft as a means of transportation? While the reasons for traveling are multiple, there is one central element: the fascination that exists behind travel. This fascination seems to be a constituent part of the human being, driven by the desire to overcome our limitations and soar through the skies in search of new latitudes. But this fascination is also driven through a collective imaginary that has been built and sustained, starting with the story of Icarus and Daedalus, and continued with countless references in popular culture that make us look to the skies and let ourselves be carried away by those desires to have wings and fly. Something that is even deeper in a country like Chile and in a city like Santiago, so far from the rest of the world and flanked by the Andes Mountains, where flying seems to be the only way to expand our borders. It is this imaginary, which seems to raise few controversies in the country, that faces the future that the aviation industry offers us, one that promises to populate our skies with different types of flying artifacts, in an image that however does not seem alien, since it has been fueled by science fiction, becoming established as the obvious path to follow. In the face of this scenario, one of the biggest questions that arises is how this reconfiguration of the skies that the aviation industry promises will be inserted within a climate crisis scenario like the one we live in, in which phenomena such as the change in the migratory patterns of birds appears as a real danger to this imaginary and that already worries the world of aviation. These are the questions that hide an imaginary as powerful as the one that the image I have chosen suggests, and in whose development Chile and its hydrogen have a lot to say and a lot to reflect on. 

Catalán Hidalgo, René. 2023. "(Mis)controlling the Atmosphere: Aeromobility-Meteorology Symbiosis, Implications and Unforeseen Consequences." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

the floor of the valley has dropped in recent decades with increased groundwater pumping by farms, meaning more land might be subject to inundation,

Flood protection in California is largely a local affair, with water agencies, special districts and private companies building and maintaining the infrastructure. Smaller towns, like those in the San Joaquin Valley, often don’t have the money to develop their own levee systems, and while the state and federal government help out, winning investment from them isn’t easy.

The Tulare Lake basin also doesn’t have major Army Corps of Engineers flood projects to buffer large amounts of water as do some areas such as the Sacramento region.

The current crisis is the opposite of the usual one--instead of fighting over who gets access to water, groups are fighting over how to get rid of it.

Farmers, residents, municipal work crews, and hired contractors are reinforcing levees, pumping out excess water, and evacuating livestock, equipment, and homes.

One group was hired to protect a supply warehouse 3 miles south of Corcoran.

J.G. Boswell Company, which mainly produces cotton, owns most of the lowlands that are the Tulare Lake bed. They have allowed some fields to flood in efforts to protect other areas (the most productive farmland). The County Board of Supervisors forced them to cut another levee and flood more land because they weren't doing enough to protect populated areas.

"Flood protection in California is largely a local affair, with water agencies, special districts and private companies building and maintaining the infrastructure. Smaller towns, like those in the San Joaquin Valley, often don’t have the money to develop their own levee systems, and while the state and federal government help out, winning investment from them isn’t easy. The Tulare Lake basin also doesn’t have major Army Corps of Engineers flood projects to buffer large amounts of water as do some areas such as the Sacramento region."

Tulare lake used to be the largest body of water east of the Mississipppi. It had ports, steamships, elk and antelope. 40 different Yokut groups lived on its shores.

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