© Patricio Robles Gil
Patricio Robles Gil's passion is for wild sheep. He photographed this one in the Sierra del Carmen region of Mexico. Click photo for more images by Patricio Robles Gil and others.
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In Mexico, says photographer Patricio Robles Gil, there is not a word to describe the concept of environmentalism. But he is helping to define the idea. Based in Mexico City, he is the essential artist-activist bent on saving places "where nature has not lost its original essence."
And he is very good at what he does. Robles Gill has focused his work around a notion he calls "conservation marketing." He has established two conservation organizations in Mexico -- Agrupacin Sierra Madre and Unidos para la Conservacin -- through which he has teamed with private corporations to produce 25 lush photo books about conservation topics, including an opus called Hotspots: Earth's Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions, produced with Conservation International in the United States. "The idea was that if we can save these particular areas, which represent only two percent of the earth's surface, we can save about 80 percent of the earth's biodiversity," he says.
But Robles Gil's great passion is the place where, as a child, he first came face-to-face with the natural world. The Sierra del Carmen mountain range, in the northern part of Mexico's Coahuila state, abuts the Rio Grande River and Big Bend National Park in Texas -- yet previously it was largely unprotected from development. After ten years of working with landowners, corporate sponsors, and the government, Robles Gil was able to help have the region officially designated as wilderness.
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