Quebracho & Catastrophe
by Kevin VaughnThis article was originally printed in Whetstone Magazine Ed. 10 in summer 2022.
In the dense, dry forest that occupies the belly of South America was born a tree that can live for 400 years. It grows at a snail’s pace. Young plants gain just five millimeters in diameter a year, half the width of the average pinky finger, and take seven years to blossom into a 2-meter-tall tree safe from the reaches of browsing herbivores.
As the years pass, and its limbs climb higher into the sky, the tree’s central root grows dense and strong and prods profoundly underground in search of rocky subterranean aquifers.
Every November, flowers burst open bright red or curdish yellow—each member of the family has their chosen shade—and beget fruits through early summer. For mysterious reasons, only some fruits bear seeds. The ones that drop and sprout on the sunny edges of the forest will likely grow quicker than those in the shade, pulling energy from the humid rays of sun that they thrive underneath; if hidden from the sun, they rise at a slower tempo; and if the forest canopy is dense and high, a seed will likely never transform into a sapling.
Leaves synthesize polyphenols that transform to tannin, which pulses up the branches toward the outer sapwood and condenses in the trunk’s core. Tannin is the tree’s great strength and also, once colonizers arrived on the continent, what would lead to its downfall.
Immature trees spend enormous amounts of energy producing tannin. The bitter flavor dissuades herbivores and insects like the long-horn beetle that scales their tall trunks to feast on fruit. The tree’s oblong and asymmetrical leaves are tough and fall from their branches every year and a half, rotting slowly. It could take up to 75 years before they fully decompose on the forest floor. Snakes, geckos and other lizards crunch and crackle loudly as they scurry across the forest.
Seven neotropical trees belong to the Schinopsis family. They are each an expression of the sun, soil and water of their native Gran Chaco, a dry forest that is estimated to have begun to form 100,000 years ago.
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Before humans started their migration to South America, glacial fluctuations pulled water and ice down from the Andes Mountains to the west and leveled the land downward toward the now extinct Paranaense Sea to the east. Along the way, it spread salty sand and clay earth that transformed into subtropical flatlands extending more than 1 million square kilometers over South America’s center.
Humans wandered to the region 10,000 years ago in search of better hunting and found an abundance of fish, game, fruits and honey. They settled along lagoons and the rivers Pilcomayo and Bermejo. Generation after generation dispersed into dozens of tribes until the people, too, became indigenous to the forest.
In the Chaco, life orbits around water, either its omnipresence or stubborn absence. Dry winters and springs are followed by intense summer downpours that stress the riverbeds until they peak and change course. Lagoons and wetlands crest by the end of the rain season and dry in late winter right as the clouds grow heavy and wet the earth again.
The Toba people of the west named the tree kotapik, while the Vilela tribe of the east called it uakin. The tannin-rich bark is rubbed on wounds and burns, or steeped for tea to lower fevers or treat asthma and bronchitis. A white varietal that flourishes in the dry eastern climate grows bark that is rich in yohimbine, an alkaloid that sends blood rushing to the sex organs.
When the Spanish arrived to the continent, the Gran Chaco became a fortress from creeping colonization. Its thorny forests, savannas and wetlands were considered uninhabitable to the foreign men. By the 19th century, newly independent nations swallowed up Indigenous-governed territories and drew new borders. Wars split the Gran Chaco between Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil.
In the mid-19th century, German and French tanners began to exploit the tree’s tannin properties for then-emerging leather curing technologies. The Spaniards introduced the United States and Europe to the tree with the name it is known by today: quebracho, a play on the words quiebra hacha, or ax breaker.
Its hard wood was used as a subproduct for building. The British pumped massive investments into Argentina, and by the turn of the 20th century, a full-blown industry was in place to extract from what was believed to be an inexhaustible supply of quebracho forests.
The beginning of the end of the continent’s second-largest old-growth forest, it would turn out, would be emerging industries of leather curing and railway building. Each only lasted a little longer than the life expectancy of a single human.
When Spanish colonizers arrived to America, the quebracho forests spread over more than an estimated 48 billion hectares, more than 15 percent of Argentina’s entire land mass. Today, they cover a little less than 13 billion.
Pancho stands patiently on a ledge that overlooks the Río Bermejo while his dogs cool themselves off in the dusty brown waters below. It’s the only moment when he stands still. His hand firmly grips his machete while he carefully scans the low waters for signs of caiman.
He’s had enough: “Vamos!” he shouts and his five pups dutifully climb a steep sand ledge and return to the grating 100-degree heat. I snap back into line, too.
We speed walk through his immense property, half of which is old forest. When he isn’t whacking low-hanging, thorny espenillo branches, he names off each and every tree and bush and their uses with his weapon: inedible fruits that you rub between your fingers into a foamy soap, leaves to garnish yerba mate that strengthen the liver and ease indigestion, an invasive native tree species ideal for firewood, another for building fence posts or rafters. He plants himself in front of a pair of trees and points to a line a meter up the trunk where the bark changes from chalky white to musty gray.
“That’s where the water normally reaches this time of year,” he says.
We are standing at least 6 meters above the river’s level.
Pancho and his wife, Vitadela, built their house in the middle of El Impenetrable in the province of Chaco, which is also where he was born. In the still densely forested region in the middle of the Gran Chaco, Pancho is surrounded by hundreds of neighbors who are in almost complete isolation from the rest of the world. There is no running water, poor internet, weak solar energy, bumpy dirt roads that connect them to one another and a small town an hour’s drive away.
Pancho worked most of his 76 years on a private property the size of nearly 400 Central Parks, land that was converted into a national reserve in 2014. He doesn’t utter the phrase “climate crisis,” but he does talk about how much the only land he’s ever known has changed over the years. The ground is drier, thorny bushes choke the forest and weather has become more extreme and less predictable. The natural equilibrium has broken.
Most of the families of El Impenetrable depend completely on their land. Livestock forage freely in the forest, and tiny gardens provide a limited list of vegetables like tomatoes, bell pepper and green onion; an ongoing drought has left gardening unimaginable. At the drought’s peak, Pancho walked back and forth nearly a kilometer carrying buckets of river water to boil and drink. The pigs, goats, chickens, cows and horses drank through the reserves of rainwater that families collect during the rain season to drink year-round. Most families rely on visiting friends or family members for fresh produce.
“The forest provides,” Pancho says. “But people have taken too much.”
Ecosystems have a natural ability to adapt to external disturbances, but constant selective logging has pushed the region to the brink. There is so little virgin forest left and such high rates of logging that the quebracho has turned into a nonrenewable resource–it’s cut down faster than it can regenerate. In this part of the Chaco, the practice fuels a logging industry that still harvests wood for tannin, building materials, coal and firewood; in other areas of the Chaco, an agrarian system cuts forests indiscriminately to plant monocultures or raise cattle.
“To an outsider, the forest looks healthy but this is not a healthy forest,” says biologist Alejandro Aquino, who works with the Fundación Rewilding Argentina at the Impenetrable National Park. He points to a low canopy forest floor and bushes and trees that choke the ground and prevent the growth of more diverse flora.
“Some neighbors are starting to realize that they need to protect their lands but the logging companies can be very convincing. People don’t have the resources to survive, it’s hard to say no.”
Semi trucks are regularly spotted carrying tree trunks out of the forest. Strange men often appear on the neighbors' doorsteps offering to buy timber. Pancho was recently offered $10usd a tree for about 25 quebrachos, which he’d have to cut down himself. He refused.
"That's less than my monthly pension,” he says. “If I cut for a little money now, I'll ruin my land forever."
Not all families have the means to say no, or the tools to understand that their lands aren’t inexhaustible.
Several neighbors mentioned that rumors of tighter logging restrictions in the province have meant more visits from lumber companies and requests for larger clearings. About a mile from Pancho’s house, quebracho logs rot on the side of the road. They were abandoned by truckers who got word that authorities were waiting for them to check permits that limit logging, particularly in areas adjacent to national reserves.
The forestry engineer Carlos Castel y Clemente was sponsored by the Spanish Crown to record and study the commercial potential of the flora of the Gran Chaco. In the 1880s, he studied the quebracho family extensively, focusing his research on the medicinal properties and abundance of tannin in quebracho colorado. His reports suggested that, despite heavy concentrations of tannin in the heartwood, the leaves and fruit husks contained significantly higher levels.
Whether or not his findings could have had an impact on tannin production for leather curing is purely speculative–it was too late. At the turn of the 20th century, Argentina burst onto the global economy as a raw material producer.
Underneath colonization, leather became among the country’s most significant exports, and quebracho offered a rotund opportunity to rule the supply chain: tannin to cure hides, and wood to build a train system to better transport them. By extension, this would guide the nation building of a young, largely undeveloped but rapidly growing country and the agricultural system that grew to define it.
British company La Forestal quickly built firm roots across the Gran Chaco, particularly in the southeast province of Santa Fe, and successfully erected a logging monopoly that functioned with near-complete political and economic autonomy.
The company paid workers with its own currency to keep salaries within the dozens of colonies they’d built. It had control over the railroads that shipped its hauls directly to ports. During a 1922 workers’ revolt, the company killed an estimated 500 to 600 workers with the help of the army. The comany’s British leaders pillaged La Forestal’s logging colonies and raped their inhabitants with next to no consequences. A handful of other companies, likewise fueled by foreign capital, perpetuated similar crimes.
A 1924 study by British research group, Taylor & Francis, sums up the zeitgeist of the time:
“The quebracho forests of northern Argentina and southern Paraguay have the distinction of being the only forests of their kind in existence,” the report says, also hypothesizing that it would take 150 years to exhaust the resource. The forest’s uniqueness was viewed in purely economic terms. For the author’s of the study, the idea of extinguishing a resource was too far away to consider; they had no concept of the ecological impact.
Trees were selectively stripped, one chunk of land after another, with tree waste hitting up to 50 percent in some regions, according to a 1935 study by the Union of American Republics.
Neither the national government or logging companies made any efforts to regenerate forests, either for commercial purposes or to protect natural resources. Conversations around conservation and regeneration didn’t enter the political sphere until 1948, with the passage of the Ley de Defensa de la Riqueza Forestal conservation law.
A representative from the province of Salta, which contains some of the Gran Chaco’s western edge, noted that the country’s production model “disturbs the climatic equilibrium…destroys the possibility of farming cultivation by calcifying the soil, modifying the humus and facilitating erosion and creating irregularities in rains, eventually transforming the most productive regions into deserts.”
The law called for the “defense, betterment and extension of forests,” and the prohibition of the “devastation of forest and forested lands and the irrational use of forest equipment.”
But there was a loophole: The legislation established that land would only be protected under federal law if it could not be developed for farming or cattle.
A hard conservation policy was too sudden, argued many politicians. The nation’s economic model had already been built. The turn of the century was marked by gargantuan growth and wealth accumulation for an elite ruling class, exclusively through the colonization of natural resources and exportation of raw materials.
While the quebracho’s tannin was used to cure hides purchased in Western Europe, its logs were used domestically to cook beef, a subproduct of the leather industry that eventually deified into a national symbol.
Meat was so abundant at the turn of the 19th century that the average family, rich and poor alike, subsisted almost completely on beef and bread: stewed, grilled, pan-fried or boiled. Scarcity of meat was never taken lightly. Post-independence Argentina saw its first mass protest in 1880 when meat was redirected to soldiers fighting for the federalization of Buenos Aires, and the cost of beef sky-rocketed.
Between 1897 and 1907, the average family spent 15 percent of its monthly salary on beef, nearly the same amount of money spent on rent, according to historian Roberto Cortés Conde. Even during years of economic crisis following the Great Depression, Argentines ate roughly 80 kilos of beef per capita annually; in 1937, consumption briefly hit a record high of 119 kilos. Consumption remained around 80 kilos until the mid-1990s when it began to progressively lower to the current 50 kilos, with chicken and pork bringing per-capita consumption of meat up to 100-plus kilograms. Beef is a symbol of belonging, a measurement of one’s place in society. Its absence is a marker of otherness, and its abundance a sign of greatness.
“We [only] ate meat the day my dad got paid, the fourth of every month. On that day we ate milanesa. It was like Christmas,” said Diego Maradona in a 2019 interview, touching on marginalization during his childhood.
For the 1986 World Cup, Maradona brought his father as the official asador, or barbecue master—many believe that a great team must be built with a good asado. Argentina took home the trophy.
Apprehension about a stricter Ley de Defensa de la Riqueza Forestal set the tone for the way that Argentina’s farming system would turn toward modern agtech practices. Any piece of land that can be developed for commercialization is free game. Both the Argentine and global desire for beef continously reconfigures the natural order.
In 1996, the Argentine government approved the use of the genetically modified soybean. Always a supporter of monoculture cash crops, the country has since become a fervent user of GMOs and their accompanying herbicides and pesticides.
Chaco is the country’s largest producer, and in the period that immediately followed the introduction of soybeans, the province cut down native forest at three times the global average.
Harvested soybeans are mashed in order to extract oil that is mostly used for fuel. The leftover expeller is a protein used for animal feed. Very little is used for direct human consumption like vegetable milks or fake meats. Much of the protein is sent abroad to Russia, the European Union and the U.K. In Argentina, it is commonly used during the final fattening stage for nearly 70 percent of cattle before slaughter.
Beef and soy production have become the main drivers of deforestation. Logging, in most cases, has transformed froma way to gather wood into a means to take as much advantage of the land as possible. Quebracho continues to be valued for its tannin, frequently advertised abroad as “vegetable-based.” Another portion is used for firewood or coal, even though it take 6 tons of wood (roughly two to three quebracho trees) to produce 1 ton of coal.
Today, arguments to re-forest aren’t heard. Industry has shifted to a changed global market and Argentine politics continue to follow suit.
In The Ecological Collapse Has Already Arrived (2020), environmental lawyer Enrique Viale and sociologist Maristella Svampa point towards this circular theme in regional politics.
“The history of extractivisim in the region isn’t linear; it appears during successive economic cycles, dependent on the demands of the world market,” they write. “In the heat of successive commodity booms an ‘El Doradian’ vision that has slowly cemented itself, weighted down by the idea that with the convergence of abundant natural resources and opportunities in international markets comes the possibility of rapid development.”
Argentina has always promised to return to its glory as a power within the global capitalist system, and continuously aims to get there the way it did the first time: extracting more and more from its natural resources. Like the legend of El Dorado — the hidden city of gold that the Spanish conquerors lusted over and destroyed for — the illusion of sudden and exorbitant development has become synonymous with destruction of nature and culture that live amid it.
The illusion is partly true. As a few did during the country’s first economic expansion, a handful accumulate enormous wealth, but not magically and not free of consequence: Rural and Indigenous populations already suffer the consequences of a rapidly changing climate, and the rest of the globe will too, if the Gran Chaco continues to be stressed and collapses. All the while, it is releasing reserves of sequestered carbon from its soils.
Back in the forest, Zulma builds a fire on a dusty patch of earth. All across the Gran Chaco, families depend on firewood to cook over pits and mud ovens, always separated from the main house in case a fire grows out of control. Rather than use her big clay oven, she places a metal garbage can with the bottom cut out over the hot coals, puts a circular grill in the middle and tops it with a piece of sheet metal.
“I don’t want to waste too much wood for a dozen empanadas,” she says, piling copper red coals on top.
Viñal is the firewood of choice in this part of El Impenetrable. It’s a thorny native tree that grows quickly and close to the ground, and becomes invasive in forests that have been cleared with fire, selectively logged or overgrazed.
“The wilderness is full of viñal. There’s too much of it,” Zulma explains. “It’s great for cooking because it lights quickly and burns hot.”
The firewood that Zulma uses to cook for her family are invasive plants or wood collected from fallen or dead trees. The beef that she stuffs into empanada shells are from cattle that forage in the forest near her home.
Across the country, home cooks and master asadors are also building fires and cooking feasts of beef. But the firewood is not the same and neither is the beef.
The coals that are used throughout Argentina are likely from quebracho wood that was selectively logged and eventually gave way to viñal — quebracho that is a subproduct of deforestation; quebracho that is burned to cook the beef that has been pumped with soy that was grown on cleared forests.
Asado is a symbol of closeness to the culture — a cultural tie to beef that overshadows its devastating impacts. Its devastation is far away for most, but each day draws closer — a national symbol of progress that could lead to the nation’s ecological collapse.
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In an effort to translate my works into Spanish, this article was translated and re-published in English and Spanish with the permission of Whetstone Magazine.
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