Cover Essay: Gleaming Power of the Andes, Sapped

The featured artist in this issue of EcoHealth is Roberto Mamani Mamani, the well-known Bolivian artist who fuses indigenous imagery with brief references to colonial invasion and modern Bolivian culture. His use of flowing mountainscapes and vibrant colors is straight from the Aymara imagery that his grandmother taught him, the roots from which he finds power. Mamani Mamani revels in this power of the Andes. In life, he concludes each email or letter with a plea for us to feel this power. He dresses as, and identifies with, his indigenous origins. In his art, he depicts vivid buttresses of Andean rock, which dominate his work and push human influence to the side. He paints women in indigenous dress soaking up the Andean sun that broils the sky to the point of apocalypse. In our cover picture, he sculpts thick wedges of glacial ice on Illimani, the peak that dominates the La Paz skyline: slopes of snow that seem to reach out magnetically and lock the sun in embrace. Mamani Mamani is a purist in his art. He sees the Andean Altiplano as a landscape where nature dominates people. How else could something so dramatic exist? In ‘‘Madre Ilimani,’’ he depicts his favorite mountain with impressionistic accuracy so that it provides a curious counterpoint to the dominating image of the sun. The view is one that he sees every day, yet the hazy sprawl of La Paz, city of a million and the highest capital in the world, is striking in its absence here. In Mamani Mamani’s mind, the city becomes just a few brightly colored houses nestled in the bosom of the landscape. On a winter’s day, as the smoke settles thick over the city, it’s possible to stand on the edge of town, look across at Illimani, and see La Paz just as it’s painted here. In a certain light, as the sun glints over the moonscape mountains, the snowcaps rise and float eerily above the land, soaring like Illimani’s namesake golden eagle. A trick of perspective mingles haze and rock to magnify the mountain’s importance. It turns La Paz into a thin smear—a modern insult to Andean purity. Here is where reality and vision part ways. Just like the rest of South America, La Paz is on a long-term growth spurt as most Bolivians seek the comforts of 21st century life. Planes connect land-locked Bolivia to a growing network of countries. Traditional and modern life merge in a complex cultural dynamic. The result is a modern compromise, one where just as Mamani Mamani sends emails in Aymara and flies his pictures to galleries around the world, the first indigenous President of Bolivia is elected. In postmodern Bolivia, the Indian roots that Mamani Mamani proudly espouses are a national gift to be treasured, where once they were eschewed or outright oppressed. Similar compromises dominate the land. We may view the Andes as a majestic wilderness outside our own influence, but in the Andean lowlands we’ve crafted a new landscape of deforestation and agricultural change. With shifting populations and agricultural pressure, we’ve created our own niches, nestling like a boil in this bosom. These niches bring wealth just as they bring poverty; health just as they bring disease (see Polop, 2010 in this issue of EcoHealth). Even in the high Andes, far beyond the treeline, our influence saps the gleaming power that nurtures Mamani Mamani. Anthropogenic climate change clips the wings of the Illimani glaciers. It creates new corridors along which invasive plants and animals creep, joining one valley with the next, even sharing disease over the cusp (Seimon et al. 2007). Our wilderness myth crumbles, even as we seek EcoHealth 7, 267–268, 2010 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-010-0361-7