Adriana Hoffmann, pioneering Chilean environmental leader and botanist, dies

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By Jimmy Langman
 
Adriana Hoffmann, the pioneering environmentalist in Chile who the United Nations honored as one of the 25 leading environmentalists in the world during the 1990s, died on Sunday. She was 82.
 
An accomplished botanist, she was the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, such as De cómo Margarita Flores puede cuidar su salud y ayudar a cuidar el planeta (1990), a classic read by Chilean children. She was co-editor of La tragedia del bosque chileno (1998), a large-format photography book about the destruction of Chilean native forests published by Douglas Tompkins. She also contributed a regular column to Chile's largest newspaper El Mercurio for several years.
 
The books she is most known for however are her many field guides about Chilean flora that she produced over more than four decades on expeditions to ecosystems across the country, such as Flora Silvestre de Chile de la Zona Araucana (1997) and Flora Silvestre de Chile de la Zona Central (1979). Along the way she is reported to have identified and classified 106 species of cactus (Cactaceae), among other flora.
 
 
A few of the field guides to Chilean flora authored by Adriana Hoffmann.A few of the field guides to Chilean flora authored by Adriana Hoffmann. 
 
 
Before she dedicated herself to botany though, she studied agronomy at the University of Chile. But she soon ditched that path; she was more interested in learning and teaching about nature. She dropped out, followed her mother, Lola Hoffmann, the renowned physiologist and psychologist, to Germany where she pursued classes there in botany.
 
During the 1980s, she worked at the Claudio Gay Foundation in Santiago designing and implementing eco-education programs and materials.
 
In 1992, Hoffmann founded Defenders of the Chilean Forest, an agile, active native forest protection group that among other projects included a quarterly newspaper about conserving forests called Voces del Bosque, edited by the journalist and writer Malu Sierra; and an environmental education program, Bosqueduca, which later spun off into a separate organization and continues to this day.
 
More generally, Defenders was a feisty crew organizing national and international campaigns to halt destructive forestry projects throughout the country, such as the spread of exotic-species tree plantations, the Trillium company’s massive forestry project on the fragile soils of Tierra del Fuego, Boise Cascade’s plans to convert forests into wood chips in the Los Lagos region, and much more. Those campaigns were largely successful.
 
 
A Defensores del Bosque Chileno press conference in the 1990s. Adriana is speaking, to her right is Malu Sierra. A Defensores del Bosque Chileno press conference in the 1990s. Adriana is speaking, to her right is Malu Sierra.
 
 
Her work at Defensores also had a role in conserving forests outright, such as the Alto Huemul Nature Sanctuary in Colchagua, which includes 3,000 hectares of roble forest including some trees more than 300-years-old. In 1996, Hoffmann set up a group of private individuals to buy the land to protect it. She was also an influential advisor to Doug Tompkins, among other things convincing the nature philanthropist to purchase Yendegaia in Tierra del Fuego which would later become Yendegaia National Park
 
In 1999, she received Chile’s National Environment Prize, and a year later, in March 2000, Ricardo Lagos asked her to become the executive director of CONAMA, Chile’s national environmental agency at that time. In an interview Jimmy Langman, executive editor of Patagon Journal, did for EcoAmericas shortly after Hoffmann took the job, she said that Chile needed to develop an “environmental culture.”
 
“The Chileans don’t have an eco-culture, a knowledge and respect for our natural resources, our natural patrimony,” she said. “We need to reconcile Chileans with nature, and make sure that children, especially in the cities, have access to nature to learn, to know, to express, and to reconcile with nature and to restore what we have lost.”
 

“The Chileans don’t have an eco-culture, a knowledge and respect for our natural resources, our natural patrimony,” she said. “We need to reconcile Chileans with nature, and make sure that children, especially in the cities, have access to nature to learn, to know, to express, and to reconcile with nature and to restore what we have lost.”

 
However, Hoffmann would only last about one year and a half in the post, resigning because of lack of support for her efforts from a center-left government that prioritized business investment projects over environmental concerns. At the same time, citizen groups were critical of her inability to push through stronger changes. She would later point to her top achievement while in the government as the launching of the Senderos de Chile project, which aimed to create a national hiking trail from Visviri in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south.
 
 
A young Adriana.A young Adriana.
 
 
In 2015, Chile’s Ministry of the Environment created the Adriana Hoffmann Environmental Training Academy, which provides environmental education courses to students, workers and companies. And in 2018, one of her long-held dreams came true when an environmental education center was established at Parque Natural Cantalao near Santiago.
 
Most of all, Hoffmann is remembered for her passion to save Chile’s native forests. “The great wealth of the native forest,” she wrote, “is that it is a natural system integrated by numerous organic elements — plants, trees, epiphytes, vines, mosses, lichens, fungi, insects and animals — all of it inserted in a system of soil, air, water, and energy. The interactions between these elements, between the alive and not alive, form a very subtle, flowing equilibrium. For a drop of water to become the tear of an animal there is a very complex process in between.”
 
 
 

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