Glaciers are more than ice masses: they help communities make sense of their place in the world. And as glaciers retreat, the identities formed in relation to place of those who depend on them are transformed. Using the example of the Central Andes of Chile, this article argues that this transformation is a political one. In the Cajón del Maipo, next door to Chile’s capital, Santiago, local connections to glaciers are not always palpable. However, they are strengthened as people start to identify with them and see their destruction as linked to development projects and the extractive industry.

This article explores the relationship between glacier retreat and place identity through a political ecology lens, using the Cajón del Maipo in Chile as a case study. While place identity has been widely discussed in environmental psychology as a set of cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements that connect individuals to their environments, it has often been depoliticized. This paper seeks to politicize the concept by emphasizing how power, struggle, and place transformations shape identity formation. Drawing on 48 semi-structured interviews conducted in San José de Maipo and Baños Morales in October and November 2024, I examine how local identities are formed and reconfigured in response to environmental degradation caused by both climate change and extractive industries. Findings suggest that opposition to, or mere acknowledgment of, large-scale development projects, like the controversial Alto Maipo hydroelectric plant, has reinforced local attachments to place and to glaciers. The article argues that place identity is not merely emotional or symbolic, but emerges through political contestation, making glaciers key entities around which power and belonging are negotiated in the context of environmental change.

As glaciers retreat in Chile, people begin to tie their identities to a nature that is being changed before their eyes.