Gabriel Holschneider is a conservationist and entrepreneur and the founder of Corazon de Pasto, a movement that aims to create awareness of the need to preserve Mexico’s Coahuila forests. Gabriel Holschneider is also a board member of the largest conservation fund in Latin America, Fondo Mexicano para la Conservacion de la Naturaleza, which also shares the mission to preserve and protect Coahuila's forests, which have recently sustained substantial damage from wildfires.
More than 200,000 acres of Coahuila’s forests were destroyed in 2011 from massive and wide-spread fires. The cause of 50 percent of these fires is believed to have been the result of farmers losing control of burns they had deliberately started. There was no authority acting to ensure that farmers had a proper fire-suppression method in place before starting a controlled burn.
Sadly, the area the fires covered included an ecological corridor that was home to a large population of Mexican black bears, and many animals perished in the fires. Corazon de Pasto aims to inform and educate others about this event and to help prevent similar catastrophes from occurring in the future.
