A wellness program with Nature Therapy in the city of Calama
By María Aurora Radich
“What are you noticing?” I asked the participants of the Nature Therapy session.
The sun begins to warm the morning in the desert. The silence is accompanied by the cooing of a turtledove hidden somewhere, among the branches of some carob trees. In the distance you can see the ochre and purple mountain ranges showing their skin, bare of all vegetation. Seeing them while we are hidden by the trees inside the oasis gives a feeling of peace, like being held in the arms of something enormous, the Pat’ta Hoiri, “Mother Earth” in the Kunza language.
“Yes, me.” said Lidia, 68 years old, “I remembered my childhood. I grew up around here, on a plot of land. My sister and I fed the chickens, and I liked to climb the trees. These were times when Calama was prettier, there was more countryside, not so many buildings. I liked that.”
Facilitating Therapies, or Nature Baths, in this environment where I was born and to which I return after twenty years, I have heard stories from those who have lived in this oasis city since times when there were more dirt roads and there were still wetlands. I perceive that they are revealing to me something important about what I believe is the heart of the methodology of the Association of Forest and Nature Therapy (ANFT), the Relational Approach.
Looking at the city of Calama, so close to the tourist-filled San Pedro de Atacama, in the far north of Chile, makes evident the way in which we affect the territories not only with industries, but also with our ways of looking at them. These are visions that, as preconceptions of a culture based on a way of consumption, can push us to give some places all our attention for being “beautiful” and others nothing or very little, and so we abandon them, and with them their inhabitants.
According to the Relational Approach proposed by Amos Clifford, founder of the ANFT, we cannot pretend to correct our relationship with the environment if we maintain that vision of the source providing resources for our life, and now for our health. In this regard, I would like to specify: resources for what we as a society have decided should be our lifestyle, but which, as science shows every year, is demanding from the ecosystem a quantity of provisions that it can no longer replenish in a year. We now call this Ecological Overshoot.
As a sort of operations center for national mining, Calama cannot be “beautiful”; above all, it must be useful. Perhaps that is why it is a city with high rates of depression, and the Antofagasta Region, in which it is located, according to statistics from the Ministry of Health, has the highest national figures for cancer mortality. Despite having one of the highest employment rates, 68% of all jobs created there are filled by people who do not live in the area. No one wants to stay.
People who were born in Calama and continue to live there, survive with that terrible mark of cities labeled as “ugly,” because perhaps it is synonymous with a Sacrifice Zone. We find, however, their surprise when they discover that their oasis is still there. It is increasingly far from the urban environment but always on the banks of the heroic Loa River, which manages to cross the driest desert in the world and reach the sea, and whose mouth was recently declared a Nature Sanctuary.
Listening to those stories where there were children hitchhiking to the river, or where they followed pequenes, little owls of the desert, to their hideouts in Yalquincha, is probably what many guides treasure as an indication that “we are doing something right,” and that it is not only helping in the propagation of the physiological benefits of contact with natural environments, but also collaborating in a deeper restoration process, and that is not in nature, but in people.
The idea has come to me that to correct the human-nature relationship, we undoubtedly depend on the affection we have for those places of our best memories, and not on the elusive concept, and sometimes so close to clichés, that culture gives us of “nature.”
Those memories give us a very personal and identity-based feeling, and when it manages to come out, it can give us the gift of observing in a different way, the place that now welcomes our lives in this sometimes-profane present. Only then, and as an extension of this process, will emerge the impacts we expect can occur in environments belonging to all the diversity of that “More than Human World”, as defined by the ANFT.
It seems to me that the Relational Approach is a tool to act precisely where the territories lose human love, and as a result, we end up leading ourselves to ruin, as Amos Clifford has said.
Forest and Nature Therapy will continue to gather studies on its effects on health. They will undoubtedly help to promote and strengthen it as a tool for well-being, but it seems to me that focusing only on it makes us lose sight of its potential in terms of affection for the territories and miss a great opportunity to correct an error generated in our own culture, disconnected from the source that makes its life possible.
Looking at the Sierra Limón Verde, a mountain range in front of Calama, I remember that once I saw on one of its dark and hard backs, a long line of white quartz shining like a river against the sun. In the desert, many things shine.