Cuarto Seminario de Flora del Norte de Chile: Patrimonio Natural y Conservación. Jardín Botánico de Aguas Antofagasta, 29 de octubre de 2014.

La Secretaria Regional Ministerial del Medio Ambiente de la Región de Antofagasta y el Jardin Botánico Aguas Antofagasta, organizan el Cuarto Seminario de Flora del Norte de Chile: Patrimonio Natural y Conservación. Actividad que se enmarca en las acciones de conservación de flora amenazada en la Región de Antofagasta.

El seminario contempla charlas de expertos botánicos y profesionales de diversas instituciones y organizaciones, sobre iniciativas de recuperación, conservación, manejo e investigación de flora bajo amenazada en la Región y norte de país.

El seminario se efectuará el día miércoles 29 de octubre, desde las 09:00 horas, en el Salón Auditorio de Aguas Antofagasta, Avda. Pedro Aguirre Cerda # 6496, Antofagasta.



PROGRAMA 4o SEMINARIO “FLORA DEL NORTE CHILE: PATRIMONIO NATURAL Y CONSERVACIÓN”

Día y Hora: 29 de octubre de 2014 de 09:00 a 17:30 hrs.

Objetivo: Generar una instancia para conocer y aprender más sobre la flora y vegetación asociada al norte de Chile, a propósito de diversas iniciativas y proyectos conducidos por universidades, instituciones públicas y organizaciones no gubernamentales. Además se entregarán antecedentes sobre experiencias de conservación y protección de la flora y su ecosistema asociado.

Mañana

09:00 a 09:20 Acreditación de participantes
09:20 a 09:45 Saludo inicial, contexto de la actividad y bienvenida autoridades
09:45 a 10:15 Exposición “Estado de conservación de la flora del norte de Chile: institucionalidad y normativa”, dictada por el Sr. Charif Tala González, Jefe de la Sección de Especies del Ministerio del Medio Ambiente.
10:15 a 10:25 Ronda de consultas
10:25 a 10:55 Exposición “Implementación de un plan de conservación exsitu, propagación y reintroducción de especies seleccionadas de la flora endémica del sitio prioritario sector costero de Paposo y su entorno: Resultados y Proyecciones”, dictada por el Dr. Pedro León, del Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias INIA Intihuasi.
10:55 a 11:05 Ronda de consultas
11:05 a 11:30 Café de Pausa
11:30 a 12:00 Exposición “Ensayos de reintroducción de flora amenazada del norte de Chile: evaluación del efecto “nodriza” como estrategia para aumentar el éxito de establecimiento”, dictada por el Dr. Marco Molina-Montenegro, del Centro Avanzado en Zonas Áridas (CEAZA).
12:00 a 12:10 Ronda de consultas
12:10 a 12:40 Exposición “Experiencias de propagación y educación de flora endémica de la Región en el Jardín Botánico Aguas Antofagasta” dictada por el Sr. Elías Ramírez Gallegos, Ing. Agrónomo del Jardín Botánico Aguas Antofagasta.
12:40 a 12:50 Ronda de consultas
12:50 a 13:20 Cierre jornada de la mañana y visita guiada a Vivero, Invernadero o Jardín Botánico

Tarde

14:30 a 15:00 Exposición “Plan Nacional de conservación de la flora costera del norte de Chile: diagnóstico y amenazas”, dictada por la Msc. Ana María Humaña de la ONG CULTAM.
15:00 a 15:10 Ronda de consultas
15:10 a 15:40 Exposición “Conservación ex situ de germoplasma de seis especies xerofíticas” dictada por el Ing. Gustavo Bolados del Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias INIA Intihuasi.
15:40 a 15:50 Ronda de consultas
15:50 a 16:10 Café de Pausa
16:10 a 16:40 Exposición “Flora de la cordillera costera de Antofagasta” dictada por Agrupación Ecológica y Cultural Caminantes del Desierto
16:40 a 16:50 Ronda de consultas
16:50 a 17:20 Exposición “Formaciones Xerofíticas en el SNASPE Región de Antofagasta”, dictada por CONAF Antofagasta.
17:20 a 17:30 Ronda de consultas
17:30 Palabras de cierre: Sr. Ramón Arestegui G., SEREMI del Medio Ambiente, Antofagasta.

EARTHQUAKE: A post-Biblical view (Terremoto, una mirada pos-bíblica), by Lebbeus Woods, 2010.

Vía Lebbeuswoods.net.



Earthquakes are the result of natural, tectonic changes in the solid crust of the earth and, as such, are not inherently catastrophic. Their bad reputation comes from the destruction to human settlements that accompanies them, when buildings collapse under the stress of forces produced by earthquakes. This destruction is not the ‘fault’ of earthquakes, but rather of the buildings, which, even in regions regularly visited by earthquakes, are not designed to work harmoniously with the violent forces periodically released. So buildings collapse, usually with considerable loss of life and injuries. The earthquakes are blamed, as though the purpose of these sublimely unself-conscious phenomena was to damage and destroy the human. “Earthquake Kills Thousands!” “Killer Quake Strikes!” “Earthquake Levels Town!” are typical aftermath headlines. What they should say is “Falling Buildings Kill Thousands!” “Killer Buildings Strike!” “Inadequately Designed Town Leveled!”

Such headlines will not, of course, appear. If they did, architects, town-planners, engineers, and the entire army of professionals responsible for the design, construction, and maintenance of the affected buildings would be called to account. If that were to happen, they would certainly implicate politicians, developers, banks and the entire army of private and public officials controlling what gets built and where, the financial/economic community that finds it more profitable to rebuild what has been destroyed than to commission the development of architectures that would work with earthquakes and thus survive them. If this profit-driven community was called to account by public outcry, it would almost certainly turn the blame back on the public itself. After all, corporations and government are under constant pressure to give the public what it wants, which today means the same products, the same lifestyles, the same buildings and types of buildings to be found anywhere on the planet, regardless of the planet’s extremely varied processes of transformation. If all these individuals and social institutions were held responsible for the destruction caused by earthquakes, then the public in earthquake regions would have no choice but to demand radical changes of them. But this would be an expensive revolution, one that all the interests involved could afford only at great cost to their reputations, knowledge and technical expertise, and to their present economic prosperity.

There is, however, a deeper structure of resistance to investing in the invention of new architectures of and for earthquake, and this is formed by the most venerable beliefs about the relationship between the human and natural worlds, considered to be essentially hostile. The ‘Man versus Nature’ attitude begins in the founding stories of some of the world’s dominant religions. Christianity, Judaism and Islam share the Biblical account of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, which came as a result of their desire for self-knowledge and, thereby, for independence from the rest of the unselfaware, wholly interdependent world. Many philosophers over the past epochs have rationalized this belief, but it was Rene Descartes who best codified it for the modern era. His philosophy postulates an essential duality of the world, comprised of the human and the Divine, which cannot be bridged, at least by the human. Not coincidentally, he also invented a mathematical systemóanalytical geometry--that organized the spatial and temporal properties of the human domain with great efficacy. Cartesian logic and geometry offer a pragmatic usefulness that shows no signs of diminishing, more than three hundred years after their inception, and in spite of immense cultural and technological changes to the society they serve. But, while Cartesian thought and method succeeded in freeing science, and therefore technology, from the grip of religion per se, it maintained the adversarial Biblical relationship between the domain of the human and the realm of ‘Divine’ nature. Nowhere is its fragility in this regard more clearly demonstrated than in earthquake regions. There, not only has the idea of the Cartesian ‘grid’ as a symbol of rational efficiency and stability been overturned (literally) by the nature of earthquake forces, but the civilizational cornerstone of human independence from Nature (a conceit, however transparent, that has propelled the notion of human progress) has been broken to bits. In light of the consistent failure of leading societies such as the United States and Japan to build effectively against earthquake, it is reasonable to reconsider the dominant philosophies, techniques and goals of building and urban design in earthquake regions.

At this writing, such a reconsideration by architects and planners has hardly begun. What is needed now are new ideas and approaches that go beyond the defensive reinforcement of existing conceptual and physical structures, and open up genuinely new possibilities for architecture in relation to the earth's continuing process of transformation. My own efforts in this direction have been sporadic and sketchy, resulting in two sets of highly speculative projects, which were published in my book of 1997, Radical Reconstruction. The San Francisco ‘houses’ of 1995, completed after research at the Berkeley Engineering Library, propose architectures extending the forces of earthquake into the dynamics of private life and social change. The ‘terrain’ projects of 1999, summarized in this book and completed after the cycle of disastrous earthquakes that struck around the world last autumn, propose that architecture be considered as an integral part of landscapes undergoing regular seismic upheavals. Both sets of projects look forward to a post-Biblical reconciliation of the human and the natural, through the conceptual and tectonic reformation of architecture itself.

16 April 2000
New York City