Sitting outside perched on a wooden log with Lorenzo Martinez Vallejos, founder of the association Reforestation Now, he’s telling me about his childhood in Paillaco, southern Chile. He grew up surrounded by astonishing biodiversity, roaming native forest (close to the famous El Gran Abuelo). Born in 1981, the native trees Lorenzo was familiar with were species such as Rauli (Nothofagus alpina) and Roble (N. obliqua) and no logging companies were present at that time.
However, 1974 presidential decree number 701, intended to promote forestation and reforestation as a form of economic development, effectively opened up the path to companies and gave them free reign. Logging companies moved in and preexisting obstacles in their path were removed. What used to be Lorenzo’s playground has since suffered the devastating consequences of widespread deforestation caused by deliberate fires and the felling of trees. The forest that once provided foragers with abundant mushrooms, berries and other foods, became just another factory for wood exportation. Native species such as Coigüe (Nothofagus dombeyi) and Avellano (Gevuina avellana) were hastily replaced with Radiata Pine trees which were used for wood chip and furniture that were exported to Japan.
In 1997 Lorenzo set off for the capital to continue his education. A few years later, after an internship at the International Labour Organization in Santiago, Lorenzo secured a second internship at ILO Headquarters in Geneva and moved to Switzerland in 2008. Shortly after, he supported a University of Bristol project on Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples in Peru led by Dr Karen Tucker.
Years later, Lorenzo became a father for the first time. It was at this point, he tells me, that everything changed. Suddenly he started to have recurrent nightmares. Night after night he faced the same image: our planet crashing in on itself. Does what I’m doing make any sense? Is it meaningful? Lorenzo kept mulling over these questions.
One night in 2019 Lorenzo woke up at 3am, picked up his laptop and put his thinking cap on. Reforestation, biodiversity, climate change… all these concepts were swirling around in his head. He reminisced about the rich biodiversity of his rural childhood where he could fish by hand (now no longer possible due to monoculture farming which has destroyed livelihoods, put water supplies at peril, and caused forest fires to destroy what little remained due to the use of non-native species). But a solution must exist, he decided: by restoring nature he could restore communities and provide rural Chileans with the opportunity to once again lead a sustainable, resilient life. And so Lorenzo purchased reforestationnow.org and set about kicking off his project.
The project has blossomed. Lorenzo has continued working alongside Dr Karen Tucker from the University of Bristol, who has helped him grasp the importance of putting indigenous communities' knowledge at the heart of reforestation initiatives. He has also started working with forest scientists, including Dr Carlos Lequesne at the Austral University in Chile, and since 2021 he began forging contacts with indigenous communities in Chile.
This includes Mapuche Pehuenche communities in Lonquimay, a municipality stretching 3,914km2, which has suffered from severe environmental degradation, leading to soil depletion and the loss of native species. Thanks to the support of an indigenous student at the Austral University, Jennyfer Antilao Romero, Lorenzo was able to meet members of the Mapuche Pehuenche community of Quinquén in January 2023. This included Joaquín Meliñir, son of the community chief, the lonko. Building on this meeting, in September 2023 Lorenzo’s team and local communities came up with a plan for a comprehensive reforestation project. The project has been designed hand-in-hand with the eleven communities in this territory, whose land covers approximately 55,000 hectares of degraded land.
Enthusiasm shines in his eyes as Lorenzo continues to tell me about Reforestation Now’s work in Lonquimay. The project aims to restore 2,000 to 5000 hectares of degraded land using native species with seeds collected by local people and grown in nurseries within indigenous communities. This will have the added advantage of generating local, green jobs and includes the recovery of indigenous knowledge of reforestation, on-the-ground work building nurseries and scientific research work on biodiversity. The first phase of the project covers two thousand hectares of native species, replacing the pine and eucalyptus with species native to the area, starting with Pehuenes/Araucarias (monkey puzzle tree).
Four years ago, Lorenzo couldn’t have imagined being where he stands today, with land, seeds, and people ready to come together and help transform a degraded environment — putting peoples’ livelihoods and health at risk — into a thriving landscape of resilient native species that can support the economies of communities, and preserve indigenous knowledges and livelihoods for many generations to come.
The Reforestation Now movement is gathering speed. Lorenzo has also begun building connections in Peru, Costa Rica, and Ecuador, as part of a vision to apply this model of reforestation to other countries. No single individual or project can save the planet from over-exploitation, but working together, Lorenzo explains how we can all move in the right direction one tree at a time, as part of a long-term investment in both people and planet to combat environmental destruction.
As I leave Lorenzo, earbuds in ear, to get on with his Peru meeting, I see the beehives behind the school, the vegetable plots just across the path, and the seemingly bee-friendly, insect-friendly tall long trees and flowers. Are we going in the right direction? Can we wait until tomorrow?
Reforestation Now is the best response I can give you. If you also believe we need to take action, please come on board and join our efforts.
By Katy Murr
The original interview this article is based on was conducted in Spanish. All translations are the author’s own.
Please note the author is a voluntary (unpaid) advisor for the organisation Reforestation Now.
The author was paid by InTent to write this article.
