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# Fernando “Pino” Rubio del Valle was a stubborn defender of Peru’s forests
- URL: https://livesinnature.org/fernando-pino-rubio-del-valle-was-a-stubborn-defender-of-perus-forests/
- Published: 2026-08-19T19:40:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-28T19:42:16.000Z
- Author: Rhett A. Butler
- Tags: Peru, 2026, Latin America, Conservation

In the late 1970s, a group of young naturalists in Lima used a room in the Rubio family home as a headquarters for their expeditions. They called it the *Gabinete de iconoclastas*. There were maps to study, frogs to look for in neighborhood ponds, plants to collect, and places along Peru’s coast that seemed worth investigating. Fernando “Pino” Rubio del Valle was often the one proposing where they should go next.

He had already done some wandering. Rubio initially enrolled at the University of Lima to study communications, partly because he hoped to avoid mathematics. He lasted two months. He then took a backpack and spent about six months hitchhiking around South America. When he returned to Lima, he discovered the forestry program at the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina. “El bosque, ¡esto es lo mío!”—the forest, this is my thing—he later recalled thinking.

Rubio went on to spend decades working in Peru’s forests as a forestry specialist, conservationist, and teacher. He died on June 12th from pancreatic cancer.

During the 1990s he worked at the Santuario Nacional Pampas del Heath, on Peru’s border with Bolivia, an area later incorporated into Bahuaja-Sonene National Park. Protection there was weak. Rubio helped build up the reserve’s ranger corps, worked with nearby Indigenous communities, and explored ways local people could benefit from forest products while maintaining the forest.

In 1996 the Field Museum in Chicago made him the first recipient of its Parker/Gentry Award for Conservation Biology. The museum credited him with helping turn a neglected reserve into one of Peru’s better-managed protected areas. Rubio later recalled dividing the prize money among the people who worked there, including administrators and park guards.

He carried that collaborative approach into later work. At Cordillera Azul National Park, where he worked with the conservation organization CIMA, Rubio helped oversee efforts to curb illegal logging across a large and difficult landscape. He favored enforcement that took account of the circumstances on the ground.

He described one approach used with loggers who were already cutting timber in areas where control posts were being established. Rather than confiscating timber representing weeks or months of labor, his teams sometimes allowed workers to remove what they had already cut and warned them not to return. Many were poorly paid laborers, some were armed, and Rubio believed that provoking a confrontation could endanger both rangers and loggers without improving protection of the forest.

Rubio was also critical of forestry rules that, in his view, were easier for large companies and organizations to navigate than for people living beside forests. He argued that local communities needed rights over forests as well as practical ways to earn income from keeping them standing. In San Martín, he frequently spoke about the consequences of forest loss for water supplies.

The region became the center of his later work. After settling in Tarapoto, Rubio helped strengthen local conservation initiatives and became closely involved with MONTUBIA, an association protecting the Cordillera de Vaquero conservation concession. He continued to join field patrols. In 2022, Rubio and three colleagues were threatened while attempting to enter the concession. They turned back and reported the threats to authorities.

![](https://www.butlernature.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Fernando-Pino-Rubio-del-Valle.jpg)

Colleagues from a younger generation came to regard him as a teacher and mentor. Remembrances describe him as forceful, irreverent, energetic, and hard to intimidate. Those qualities were already evident decades earlier in the young forestry student organizing expeditions from his family home in Lima.

After Rubio was diagnosed with cancer, José Carlos Nieto Navarrete, the head of Peru’s protected-areas agency and a colleague of more than 20 years, visited him at home. Rubio jokingly called himself a “dinosaurio de la conservación.” They spent part of the visit discussing protected areas and the problems of managing them.

Rubio had been having versions of that conversation for most of his adult life. Even while ill, there was still another forest problem to discuss.