Linking Technology and Landscape

At first, no one knew why the flamingo population began to decline slowly, only to complain that there weren't enough flamingo eggs for breakfast. In Yue Yu’s research, it was found that an imbalance in the lagoons' ecosystem was the cause. The mining of lithium resources destroyed the salinity of the original water system, algae began to bloom, and an ecological imbalance occurred. Eventually, the environmental imbalance led to a small-scale species extinction that made it inevitable that the flamingos would lose their food, their feathers would no longer be bright, and they would have difficulty attracting mates and go extinct. But where does the salt in the water come from - no one knows the exact answer.

The flamingo reality claim is a spiritual issue, and it is called structural violence or slow violence. Chilean law defines brine as a mineral resource and not a water resource. In this covert way, the law turns indigenous people's "right to clean air and pure water" into "the ability of the inhabitants to buy minerals".

It is worth noting that the voices of indigenous people are ignored, whether simple data represent the environment or whether environmental impacts are measured solely by Western science. Such a system of knowledge is a new form of colonialism. Whether it is the silent alteration of a natural ecology or a broken culture, it is driven by the epistemologies of the North, which are "based on the negation of the inhabitants and knowledge of the territories that are subjected to colonization and exploitation" (de Sousa Santos 2019).