By Antonio Skarmeta (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-27 07:24

Chileans have long boasted of the untold riches of their land, fertile soil and pristine air. For centuries, they thought Chile's robust natural landscape and way of life served to compensate for the geography that separated the country from the rest of the planet.

In this small country at the far edge of the world, Chileans always believed that at the very least they were protected from plagues and epidemics.

But distance, it seems, does not protect Chileans from climate change. While Chile has a blazing desert at its head, its feet lies beneath ice, with 18,000 sq km of continental ice masses and the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of Antarctica that it claims.

Compared to that of other countries, Chile's contribution to the scourge of global warming is relatively low, at 0.2 percent, yet it will pay a big price. Global warming is melting Antarctica, and as a result large quantities of water will inundate Chile's coastline.

The beautiful Andean glaciers of southern Chile are also melting. Latin Americans tend to exaggerate, but I do not think I am overstating things when I say that for an environmentalist the sight of those breaking glaciers is as distressing as the collapse of Notre Dame would seem to a Parisian.

In Santiago, a few thousand kilometers from Antarctica, boiling hot temperatures have heralded the start of summer. This is, in general, a happy time of year, but it certainly feels eons away from my adolescent years when we sang along to Here Comes the Sun and warmed our souls with the hippie energy of Let the Sunshine In.

Today in Chile, the first thing people think of when they hear the word "sun" is "sun block". We are advised to go to the beach only in late afternoon.

Because of this, Chilean victims of climate change have become addicted to Rabelaisian lunches beneath the shade and snore-filled siestas, all in the interest of killing time until sundown. Now, only at twilight do we summon the courage to hit the waves of the Pacific. But what we gain in health we also gain in weight.

The climate change has done serious damage to fruit and vegetable crops, most particularly my favorite, the "palta," or avocado. An exporter I know told me that this season's uncharacteristic frosts ruined 40 percent of his crop. Among farmers a feeling of apprehension has taken hold; the weather has always been slightly capricious, but of late it has become altogether unpredictable.

In 1545, Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, encouraged his fellow Spaniards to settle here because "there is no better place in the world in which to live, now and for generations to come". A few centuries later, our national anthem reiterated this ecological zeal: "Pure, Chile, is your blue-hued sky. Your fields embroidered with flowers are a joyous likeness of Eden."

If tiny Chile does not persuade the giants of this planet to control their talent for destruction, in a few decades' time the literary allusion that might best reflect our land will no longer be the "joyous likeness of Eden" of our national anthem but rather "paradise lost".

Antonio Skarmeta is the author of The Postman and the forthcoming novel The Dancer and the Thief. This article was translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish. New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 12/27/2007 page11)