Adriana Hoffmann, a botanist, author, educator, and environmental activist who both studied and fought to conserve Chile’s native plant life, died in her home in Santiago, Chile on March 20. She was 82 years old.
After struggling with health problems for several years, she died of an acute clot in her lung, her daughter Leonora Calderón Hoffmann tells The New York Times.
According to the Times, two Chilean cabinet ministers attended Hoffmann’s funeral, underscoring her importance to Chile’s environmental legacy. Speaking at Hoffmann’s funeral, Chile’s Minister of the Environment, climatologist Maisa Rojas, recognized the obstacles that Hoffmann had faced—and those that Chile and the world continue to confront.
“Now more than ever, we have been called to take care of a threatened and very degraded nature,” Rojas says, according to the Times. “As a woman and a minister of the environment, I put Adriana’s shoes on, and they are too ...
