Project Update: December 2009

This year we had a long dry season – many wildfires and dust storms. Finally the rains arrived in December 2009 with further soil erosion in the burnt areas. Together with the rains we have volunteer planting teams every other weekend. Our team is also very active giving conferences (to date 12), talks to the media about our severe environmental situation (five TV programmes and several radio programmes) and we distributed over 400 educational DVDs with local and international videos. We continue to be active in lobbying for a forest protection act and organized a second “Water and Forests Workshop” from September 17-19 2009 (see www.reforestacion.com.ar). A restoration ecology course was given in September-October 2009 for 18 graduate students, and two more courses are scheduled for late summer.

The central Argentine environmental community is growing substantially and the RSGs have contributed to this, unfortunately human population and the use of the resources also grows fast. Illustrative of this fact, of the 15 restoration sites we have intervened, most are doing well - but during the last year three were burnt and other two were destroyed by bulldozers to build a highway and a plaza for children to play - a paradox, considering a by-product of deforestation is that every year we have more days with severe dust storms in which roads and plazas cannot be used.