is devoted to quell a possible environmental tragedy. Consequently, fires are extinguished, except for a few cases, swiftly. Meanwhile, at the southern end, the lack of resources and planning lead to thousands of trees lost in the conflagration without any mitigating circumstances. The results are contradictory: in the north there are homogenous old woods that are reduced, when a major fire occurs, in thousands of hectares. At the southern end, there are heterogeneous forests with patches of different ages with a different combustion degree, that is, young forests skirting along old ones preventing fires of bigger proportions. The paradox is significant to me for it is happening, mostly, as a result of cultural and political practices. Let’s say that such actions determine, to a great extent, the ecosystems we live in, the ones we depend on. Hence, the natural environment becomes the historical outcome of the interpretations a human group assigns them: its ways of intervening it and giving it a meaning. The geographies of northern Mexico (the southern United States) are largely made up of the deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua. These geographical contexts have been strongly determined by the notions of territory and limit, while integrating one of the most biodiverse ecosystems of this nature in the world. Photography on illegal migration, generated mostly by Latin American documentalism2 and, in the American context, landscape photography, inherited from European painting and the photography of landscapes intervened by human action, headed by the
2
Latin American photography is usually linked to political causes and social struggle, with representations of the mestizo cultural identity that defines their societies, and with the landscape environment. This has generated an aesthetic associated to anthropological photography and photojournalism, giving rise to a physical approach of the photographer with the subject captured as a symptom of his involvement with the facts.
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Underdevelopment is sustainable / Alfredo Káram