Gertrude Blom

Blom's former home Casa Na Bolom is a research and cultural center devoted to the protection and preservation of the Lacandon Maya and La Selva Lacandona rain forest.

She grew up in the village of Wimmis, where her father Otto Lörtscher was a minister and much of her childhood play was influenced by the wild west tales of Karl May.

Her marriage ended a few years later when Blom moved to Germany to report on Adolf Hitler and growing Nazi brutality for Swiss newspapers.

In 1939, after Blom was arrested and deported back to Switzerland, she planned to travel to New York and raise funds for war refugees, but a sudden change of heart led her to join the mass emigration of pacifists, communists, labor leaders, artists and Jews welcomed to Mexico by President Lázaro Cárdenas.

In 1943, influenced by the adventures of French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle, whose book on jungle exploration she had read on the boat to Mexico, Blom convinced a government minister to let her join a Chiapas expedition going in search of the legendary and rarely photographed Lacandon Maya.

Later that year, on a second expedition to visit another Lacandon settlement, she met Frans Blom, a Danish archeologist and cartographer who was in the jungle searching for the Mayan ruin of Bonampak.

Eventually, Casa Na Bolom evolved into an inn attracting visitors from all over the world, including archeologists from major American universities and guests as notable as Diego Rivera, François Mitterrand, Helen Hayes, and Henry Kissinger.

On her own, she made lecture tours with slide shows of her documentary photographs, traveling in Mexico, the United States, Germany and Switzerland to raise awareness of the irreparable damage being done to the jungle.

In her essay The Jungle is Burning, Blom writes "If mankind continues abusing the planet as we are today, the effects in the near future will be far worse than the devastation that would be caused by any atomic bomb.