For Vicente Parabá, Bolivia’s Otuquis National Park is an extension of his home.
“I represent this Indigenous nation,” says the Chiquitano park ranger. “We have a commitment to nature, a commitment to protect the environment.”
Parabá has earned the respect of everyone in the region over the years, from the hunters he convinced to take their sport outside the park even before it was designated a protected area, to the ranchers he helped when they were bitten by deadly snakes.
Now, he also works to promote sustainable development in the Bolivian Pantanal, a part of the region that is largely preserved and that he wants to continue to defend.
Parabá knows that unsustainable activity outside of the protected area can have a serious impact on the park. “An infrastructure project that doesn’t consider environmental impacts will affect the entire natural environment of the park,” he says, citing the iron dust from nearby mines being kicked up onto plants by passing trucks and an old road running through Otuquis that cuts off its natural water flow.
“We’ve been talking about global warming for years now and many people say that protected areas will soon be the only forests that exist, creating all our oxygen, all the air we breathe. If we don’t protect them now, we’ll have nothing left.”