We are not taking the environment’s protection seriously, says Argentinean Naturalist and Poet

La Nación,
26 November 2008, Argentina

Alfredo Lichter says he is a bit disenchanted: “In 30 years, the environmentalist movement has not been able to change ways of life nor to get to people. Up to this moment we have not been able to take the environment seriously. It is considered an experts’ subject. If society does not incorporate a culture of protection, distant problems will end up becoming close very soon”, he states.

This poet and naturalist knows what he is talking about. He has dedicated a good part of his life to studying the sea and to creating messages that give relevance to the need of changing our relationship with nature.

Lichter is 53 years old, studied biology and agronomy and has spent many years studying sea mammals.

He was member of the Argentinean delegation of the International Whale Commission and was included in the Sprit of Enterprise Rolex Award Book (1987) because of his project of creating a South American network of whale sighting.

He is author, among other publications, of Huellas en la arena, sombras en el mar –Los mamíferos marinos de la Argentina y la Antártida (Footsteps on the Sand, Shadows in the Sea –Sea Mammals of Argentina and the Antarctic–) and co-author of Guía para el reconocimiento de cetáceos del Mar Argentino y de las ballenas de la Patagonía (Handbook for Cetaceans Recognition in the Argentinean Sea and for Whale Recognition in La Patagonia), which was sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

In 1994 he received the Fortabat Poetry Prize.

He is the current president and founding member of Ecocentro de Puerto Madryn (Madryn’s Port Ecocenter), which was originally ideated and developed by him. He wrote, in collaboration with Santiago Kofadloff, Un manifiesto por la vida del mar (A Manifest for Sea Life).

Carmen María Ramos interviewed him for the newspaper La Nación. If you want to read it, in Spanish, you can visit www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1074300. In it, he argues for the need of a public policy and considers that NGO should be consciousness movements and change promoters. Ecocentro Foundation, established in Madryn Port, is a voice that proposes a profound cultural change, in which education, poetry, music, science, literature and art open the door to the physical and the metaphysical aspects of the sea. He also argues for the need for a national policy that should establish alternative paradigms to the ones that suggest that life and planet Earth are objects of domain. Otherwise, problems will not find a solution. This does not mean that work and production relations with nature should be left behind, but that we should understand that nature is not a passive matter of possession and exploitation.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1074300