Part Three in a series entitled “Snail Tries to Clear Out his Header Topics Folder before the End of the Year”

This is a serious thread topic with a serious message: Don’t buy clothes that you don’t need.

Chile’s Atacama Desert is a strip of land 1000 miles long that lies west of the Andes, and is the driest true desert in the world. So dry in fact that experiments exploring the idea of landing on Mars are conducted there. Although some parts of the desert have never experienced rain (according to records by humans, anyway), spectacular desert blooms do occur when rainfall does occur and rouses the dormant seeds in the earth.

This bloom is unpredictable and usually happens once or twice a decade, although both 2024 and 2025 experienced the phenomenon. The most emblematic plant of the bloom is the ‘Pata de Guanaco’ with its pink flower which carpets the desert in a beautiful manner.

Unfortunately the dry conditions of have made it an attractive place to illegally dump unwanted clothing from the global north, and an unimaginable number of tonnes of waste has “begun to accumulate” as Wiki euphemistically puts it.

Astounding amounts of discarded textiles in piles so large they’re visible from space which are set ablaze spreading toxic black fumes over the land to poison the flora, fauna, and hundreds of thousands of Chileans such as the citizens of Alto Hospicio. More about this crime against nature and the efforts spent to combat it can be read here and here and here. Please do, when you have the opportunity.

In the meantime, enjoy the flowers and take care of yourselves today.