Paper short abstract:

This papers offers a historical perspective on the intersection between conservation and resource extraction in northern Patagonia (Argentina) focusing on early conservation efforts in the 30s and 40s, and the establishment of a secret atomic project that challenged this ethos.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reviews and complicates some of the foundational categories that eventually become a staging ground for the ‘conservation boom’ in northern Patagonia. The creation of the Nahuel Huapi National Park in the Andes in the 1930s enabled the Argentine National Parks Bureau to build roads, hotels, churches, and tourist villas, profoundly transforming the built environment of the town of Bariloche, the gateway to the park. The resignification of this space committed Bariloche to a primary role as steward and enforcer of a state-sanctioned conservation ethos, with a cultural landscape that reflected its purposeful and cohesive legacy. This ethos constitutes nature as simultaneously pristine and institutionally constructed. However, in the late 1940s, a secret scientific project authorized by President Juan Domingo Perón disrupted this narrative in two ways. The Huemul Atomic project, set in the middle of the lake, becomes a destabilizing force for the history of conservation of Nahuel Huapi. On the one hand, the Huemul project disempowered the citizens of Bariloche from any territorial decision-making with regards to the uses of the island. On the other hand, the project uprooted the value of conservation from the island itself, which henceforth became a sort of non-space that fails to be re-patrimonialized for the following seventy years.