“We can all be Perito Moreno. We do not have to stay with the fact that he was the one who donated his own land to create a national park and that he was a kind of superhero that we cannot imitate. We can all be like him, ”said Emiliano Ezcurra, director of the non-governmental organization Banco Bosques.
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The environmentalist refers to the Nahuel Huapi National Park, which was the first in Argentina. It was created in 1934 after the charitable gesture of Francisco Josué Pascasio Moreno, better known as Perito Moreno, who was a lover of nature and Patagonia. It gave 7,500 hectares so that everyone could enjoy the wonderful landscapes.
That same gesture is what the Banco de Bosques offers to those who want to stop deforestation in the country. “Basically what we do is come to the rescue of forests that are published in the real estate market and that we know that they are going to destroy them to transform them into an industrial crop,” explained the environmentalist..
“What we do is summon different donors around the world from the web so that they can make small contributions”, stressed Ezcurra, who was vice president of the National Administration of National Parks between 2016 and 2019.
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Ezcurra said that they were already able to save four forests (two in Misiones, one in Chaco and one in Santa Cruz) and that they are in the middle of the campaign to rescue the fifth. “We are working to save the fifth forest. It is a small forest of missionary jungle called Las Araucarias. The site is spectacular and belongs to a subsystem with the presence of araucarias, and that makes it very important because there are not many specimens left. We have to keep gathering wills to be able to save him. People are joining http://bancodebosques.org. There was a project to eliminate that forest to make a large herb plantation. But with small amounts of money square meters are saved ”, he explained to BLACK RIVER.
He came up with the idea of starting the foundation in 2009 when he saw the number of land sale notices being featured in newspaper classifieds. Thus was born the NGO. “This idea came from reading the newspaper. Looking at the classifieds, in the real estate section of fields. I always traveled a lot in the northern forests. And I started to see how the bulldozers were bulldozing them. Those same forests were posted in classifieds. And I realized that what they were asking per hectare were low amounts. Of course: you had to buy thousands of hectares. That is why an ordinary person cannot acquire them ”.
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What they did was put together a platform where people can donate small amounts, and thus the funds are raised to buy these forests and “dedicate them to their perpetual protection, to their sustainable use and not to have a bulldozer put on top of them and that nothing is left ”. They have also had cases of philanthropists who have made million-dollar donations to save a forest, which will later be transformed into a National or Provincial Park, as happens with all those that the NGO can recover.
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