María Angélica Di Giacomo expressed her indignation and anguish over the treatment that the City of Buenos Aires gives to green spaces and public spaces. She referred in particular to the indiscriminate mutilation of trees carried out by the City government with “progress on absorbent soils, such as wetlands and the delivery of public land to private enterprises.” And she stressed that “they use common goods for the profit of a few.” “They put metal trees in the squares where children play, they don’t care about green. They seek to train children in artificiality and banality, there are hardly any places where they can go to play and be with nature,” she said. .
María Angélica Di Giacomo, founder of the Asociación Enough to Mutilate Our Trees, spoke on Pachamama Day with Elizabet Vega Gron and Javier Corcuera on the program Lugares Comunes on Radio Caput and stressed that “it is an integral issue, it is not about take care only of my block but of seeing the city as a system with relationships with other territories. Everything is related to the environment.
Regarding the viralization of Rodríguez Larreta’s artificial trees, Di Giacomo described the situation as tragicomic, “the trees fell with the rains. The images of those metal trees brought great indignation, I felt that they did not take this into account because what we fought so hard for,” he said.
The environmentalist argued that “we see daily that in CABA they mistreat nature, green spaces are at risk, added to the delivery of land on the waterfront and other public spaces.” Regarding her decision to protect them and form the Association, María Angélica Di Giacomo stated that “we are a group of citizens who have been in this for 10 years. I began with the anguish caused by the systematic destruction of living beings that suffer irreparable damage, such as trees. but today we have several more occupations”. “I realized that alone I could not achieve anything, we need to join forces.” For this reason, she said that her motto is: “Action saves us and union strengthens us.”
Regarding the problems that the City of Buenos Aires presents in caring for the environment, he highlighted that “construction companies destroy trees with the permission of the communes, since this vandalism is never sanctioned. Pruning causes great damage, it is irreversible, they do it in squares and streets. They are all being pruned, they suffer wounds that cannot be healed.” The consequences are that the trees “get sick more easily, are more vulnerable and take away the benefits that the foliage provides. As a rule, they prune 70,000 trees per year, without taking into account the particularities.” This year, once again, they proceeded with the winter pruning despite the appeals, “judicial rulings, specialists, part of the legislative power, the Argentine network for the landscape support us. We know that we are right, they could never attack our foundations,” reflected Di Giacomo.
In turn, he told about the poor maintenance of green spaces that artificial irrigation is poorly implemented since it suffocates palm trees and old trees. “They plant Bahian grass that is not from this climate and to maintain it they choke out ancient trees” so there are “design and care problems,” she added.
The specialist defined it as “urban extractivism by which they leave it to the discretion of individuals and companies to damage and take advantage of common spaces, thus we see the sidewalks occupied by tables of bars, cement everywhere, and we are about to definitively lose the coast of the Silver river”. And she stressed that “they use common goods for the profit of a few.”
Finally, he warned that “the climate crisis is irreversible, in the summer the consequences will be seen, we are running out of protection. We must see beyond our navel and join the collective work to protect our right to nature, which gives physical well-being, mental and environmental.
