From Argentine Patagonia, Mariano Coscarella is the newest advisor on Greengrants’ Southern Cone Advisory Board. This board recommends grants to groups in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay on issues including sustainable fisheries, indigenous rights, and forest protection. Mariano, with his focus on the southern reaches of Patagonia, brings a new geographic breadth to the board.
Trained as a marine biologist in the National University of Patagonia and the University of Buenos Aires, Mariano has always focused his career on the interactions between human activities and marine life, with special interest in the tourism and fishing industries. His areas of expertise include dolphin ecology and genetics, and most recently he headed a project on the impact of tourist-oriented dolphin watching on a population of Commerson’s Dolphins. This research was part of the National Center for Patagonia’s Marine Mammal Laboratory.
Mariano has also served as the General Director of Conservation of Protected Areas in Chubut Province, including the Valdes Peninsula and Tombo Point—home between them to right whales, elephant seals, guanacos, and the world’s largest continental penguin reserve. Currently, Mariano is Sub-Secretary for the Environment for the Puerto Madryn City Council. His experience in coastal and marine management and broad connections to conservation networks throughout the region make Mariano a valuable addition to the Southern Cone Advisory Board.
In this interview, Mariano tells us why he is pleased to be partnering with Greengrants and what he hopes to accomplish in his role as an advisor.
What excites you about your new partnership with Greengrants?
My vision for conservation has always involved humans. That is to say, my research has always focused on creating compatibility between human activities and species—and habitat—conservation. Greengrants gives me the opportunity to take this one step further, by promoting this idea among others so that they also can learn that environmental conservation can be achieved though creating compatibility with other human interests. Development in its essence is not the opposite of conservation.
What are the advantages of working with local grassroots groups?
I am completely convinced that small groups promote big ideas. I know that small associations and local groups are the ones that take the first steps in achieving transformations that benefit the environment around them. And it is there, in the local environment, where ideas should be supported and developed, fed and promoted. Through direct contact with the members of these groups, we can find future leaders. It is in these leaders that we will find the key for positive change.
What do you hope to achieve as an advisor on the Southern Cone Advisory Board?
Through my work as an advisor I hope to be able to support small groups that are spread throughout the vast territory of Patagonia. These groups face additional challenges because of their isolation. One of my goals as an advisor is to connect them to each other. My intention is to support them in understanding that the problems they face in each of their far-flung towns are not so different, and that they can take action to promote environmental change at the local level as well as the regional level. In places like Patagonia this is especially important, because the human impact here has yet to reach the magnitude that it has reached in so many other areas of the planet. The residents here are in the process of realizing that their future development doesn’t need to compromise the quality of the environment.