All-night bush party

19 February 2025 is our 25th Anniversary. Reluctantly, I agreed to have an all-night bush party for our employees and the villagers. They’ve promised to start the next morning with planting of trees at exactly 7 o’clock. We’ll see!

My name is simon rietveld and I restore wilderness. I am a poor dancer, but proud of the results of my team. Party or no party, we’ll continue changing empty land into new forest for animals that lost their habitat.

25 years ago, I saw the destruction of the forest I knew from my childhood. Instead of walking underneath beautiful trees, I was crying next to smoking trunks and skeletons of lemurs and tortoises. Together with my wife Jocelyne, I bought a piece of empty land and started planting trees. I wanted to restore the original wilderness and save threatened animals from extinction. Years of almost continuous problems followed, lawsuits about land ownership, more bush fire, cyclones, violent poaching, illegal logging, corruption. And sometimes there were happy moments, the first couple of Vasa parrots and the first red-fronted lemurs breeding at Zazamalala. And the gratitude of local villagers when we constructed water pumps to help them with clean drinking water.

I still stand on the frontline against nature destruction. Will you help me?