The Earth Repair Hall Of Fame

March 8, 2022 Global Earth Repair

Herein are some of our major heroes and heroines of the Global Earth Repair movement. These are people who have made a distinct, tangible difference. Of course, many of these people are part of group efforts, but these we wish to Recognize have also inspired and motivated thousands of others. Proof positive that just one person, or a few collaborators, can be a catalyst toward entire movements! These folk and groups listed represent to us that essential spark.

This list also includes models of what hav worked, and potentially those that will – both restoration and role models. The people and communities of our world need examples and inspirations. The study of this list will help give you an idea of the enormity and scope of the world’s restoration efforts.

Websites, videos and references are included for many of these entries. Please keep in mind, this is a work in progress. We ultimately wish to create a list of All the leading Earth Repair individuals, groups and movements, within every country in the world. It would include thousands of notable people. Here we have just the start.

A genuine query: “What other lists like this exist out there?” We also ask that our visitors please send nominations to add to the GERF Hall of Fame! There is a form to fill out, here.

You may browse this list alphabetically using the letter links below, OR browse by continent – click a continent on the map below to bring up a page full of all the Earth Repair heroes from there!

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

^ Browse by Map! Click a continent to see what’s happening in that part of the world!

Leyla Acaroglu – Eco Innovator (UnSchool) – Melbourne, Australia

Leyla Acaroglu is an Australian designer, sustainability innovator, and educator. She challenges people to think differently about how the world works. She connects systems, sustainability and design together as tools for addressing the planet’s biggest challenges. Leyla is internationally recognized as a leading force in the movement for a sustainable and circular future. Leyla’s writing on systems-based approaches to complex problems has been featured in several publications, including Quartz and The New York Times. Read More

Maxima Acuña de Chaupe – Protectionist/Activist – Tragadero Grande, Peru

Máxima Acuña is a Peruvian weaver and subsistence farmer living in a remote town in the Northern Highlands of Peru. Acuña stood up for her right to peacefully live off her own property, a plot of land sought by a Mining company to develop the Conga gold and copper mine. Despite numerous death threats, alleged beatings, intimidation and court proceedings, she refused to sell her 60-acre plot of land. Read more

Robert Adrian de Jauralde Hart (1913-2000) – Highwood Hill Farm – England, Europe

Robert Adrian de Jauralde Hart (1913-2000) was an English pioneer of forest gardening in temperate zones. He created a model forest garden from a 0.12 acre (500 m²) orchard on his farm. Hart began with a smallholding called Highwood Hill farm at Wenlock Edge. His intention was to provide a healthy and therapeutic environment for himself and his brother Lacon, who was born with severe learning disabilities. Read more…

Dr. William Albert Albrecht (1888 – 1974) – Missouri, USA

Dr. William Albert Albrecht was not only a distinguished scientist and brilliant scholar; he was also a true visionary and committed humanitarian. He believed that animals, including humans, provide biochemical photographs of the soils in which their foods are grown. He was the foremost authority on the relation of soil fertility to human health and earned four degrees he saw a direct link between soil quality, food quality and human health. Twenty years before the phrase ‘environmental concern’ crept into the national consciousness, he was lecturing from coast to coast on the broad topic of agricultural ecology. Read more…

Glenn Albrecht – Earth Emotions – Australia

Glenn Albrecht is an environmental philosopher with both theoretical and applied interests in the relationship between ecosystem and human health. He was Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Western Australia. He has pioneered the research domain of ‘psychoterratic’ or earth related mental health conditions with the concept of ‘solastalgia’ or the lived experience of negative environmental change. He also has publications in the field of animal ethics including the ethics of relocating endangered species in the face of climate change pressures. Read more…

Peter Andrews – Natural Sequence Land Restoration – Australia

Peter Andrews is the creator of “natural sequence land restoration,” a holistic land management process. He founded the Watershed Organization Trust, which focuses on the effect of dry land restoration and water cycle.He has applied these insights in restoring his and other properties to fertility levels that he says existed upon European arrival in this country. In 2011, Peter Andrews was awarded Australia’s highest public award – the Order of Australia Medal. He is a Consultant on the Advisory Board of Rain for Climate, an international organisation formed by pre-eminent climate, soil and water scientists from around the world. Read more…

Maria Wilvenna Añora – AtoANI – Bohol, Philippines

Maria Wilvenna Añora is the co-founder and the strategy lead of AtoANI, a startup social enterprise, which produces and distributes organically-farmed fresh produce. She also co-founded AtoANI BioPack which produces biodegradable packaging from agro-industrial waste. AtoANI currently supports 20 farmers in the Filipino province of Bohol to reduce post harvest waste and create biodegradable packaging for their product. Read more

Ray Archuleta – Understanding Ag & The Soil Health Academy – Missouri, USA

Ray Archuleta has had a long career in the world of agronomy and promoting healthy soils. Starting out with the NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Services) to now serving as part of the Soil Health Academy that helps educate farmers and landowners on promoting healthy soils. Archuleta teaches biomimicry strategies and agroecology principles for improving soil function. Read more

Sunderlal Bahuguna – Chipco Movement Environmental Activist – Uttarakhand, India

Sunderlal Bahuguna (1927-2021) was an Indian environmentalist and Chipko movement leader. The Chipko movement not only provoked greater environmental consciousness across India, but also inspired other environmental movements across the world. He fought for the preservation of forests in the Himalayas, first as a member of the Chipko movement in the 1970s, and later spearheaded the anti-Tehri Dam movement from the 1980s to early 2004. He was one of the early environmentalists of India and later he and others associated with the Chipko movement and started taking up wider environmental issues, such as being opposed to large dams. Read more

David Bainbridge – Desert Restoration – USA

David Bainbridge is a Research Ecologist focusing on dryland degradation and desertification, which now affects almost a billion people around the world, as his passion remains in how to understand, repair, and restore damaged ecosystems. He is an expert in the ecology of desert plants, explores the causes of desertification and land abuse, and outlines the processes and procedures needed to evaluate, plan, implement, and monitor desert restoration projects. Read more…

Isidro Baldenegro (1966-2017) – Activist – Sierra Madres, Chihuahua, Mexico

Isidro Baldenegro was a was a farmer and community leader of Mexico’s Tarahumara people as well as prominent indigenous activist. Murdered by gunman on January 18th of this year, Baldenegro had worked to protect the Mexico’s Sierra Madre range, one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems from drug traffickers and loggers. His work had won him the 2005 prestigious Goldman Environmental Award. Baldenegro was active in his defense of the ecosystem in Sierra Madre where his community has been living for hundreds of years. He founded an NGO in 1993 to combat deforestation. He organized community marches and blockades that caused a temporary shut-down of logging by the government in 2002. Read more

Flavia Balderi & Ana Paola – Copaiba – Sao Paulo, Brazil

Sisters Ana Paula and Flávia Balderi founded Copaíba as teenagers in 2009. Horrified by the deforestation around their area, they decided to take matters into their own hands by planting trees around their hometown. Soon they turned their passion into an association which at first they funded with jobs in delivery services and barkeeping. Named after an oil resin derived from the trunk of several native South American trees, Copaíba is one of the 300 tree-planting projects in the umbrella organisation PACTO Mata Atlântica. Read more

Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889-1982) – Men of the Trees Society – Kenya, Africa

Richard St. Barbe Baker is the First Global Conservationist as he founded the Men of the Trees Society in 1922 in Kenya. Now based in the UK, this organization is still active today as the International Tree Foundation, whose many chapters carry out reforestation internationally (over 100 countries). Over the course of his great works, Richard had international impact, and he is the person who inspired Michael Pilarski to start Friends of the Trees Society in 1978. By some estimates, organizations he founded or assisted have been responsible for planting at least 26 trillion trees, internationally. Read more…

Kehkashan Basu – Green Hope Foundation – Canada, Dubai UAE

Only in her 20s, Kehkashan Basu is already a global influencer, environmentalist, TEDx Speaker, social enterprise innovator and author. In 2012 (at age 12) she founded the Green Hope Foundation to provide a platform for engagement and empowerment of children and youth, especially those representing vulnerable groups, and turn them into changemakers who address the sustainability issues at a local level. By 8 years old she was persuading those around her of the importance of environmental action. Read more

Daan Bleichrodt – IVN Tiny Forest – Netherlands

Daan Bleichrodt is on a mission to re-connect urban kids with nature worldwide. He is Chief Tree Planting Officer at the IVN environmental education and leads the Tiny Forest movement in the Netherlands. He is also a consultant and teacher for Earthwatch in the UK, Goodplanet in Belgium, and Ecosystem Restoration Camps. Read more…

Janine Benyus – Biomimicry Institute – Montana, USA

Janine Benyus is a biologist, a self-proclaimed “Nature Nerd”, an innovation consultant, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. An educator at heart, Janine believes that the more people learn from nature’s mentors, the more they’ll want to protect them. This is why she writes, speaks, and revels in describing the wild teachers in our midst. Read more

Octavian Berchanu – Former Environmental Officer – Bucharest, Romania

Octavian Berceanu, a former commissioner for the Romanian environmental police is now a climate activist who tracks down waste smugglers. “These are organized crime structures!” he says. He partakes in “Reforestation without official permission, as sand is overrunning Oltenia, a historical region in southern Romania. It’s getting hotter and drier, with sandstorms now reaching all the way to Bucharest. As they try to prevent the worst, environmentalists are turning to reforestation. Read more

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe – Soil Biogeochemistry Lab @ UC Merced – Merced, CA USA

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a soil and global-change scientist and educator passionate about all things related to the science and beauty of soils. Berhe was born and raised in Asmara, Eritrea in northeast Africa bordering the Red Sea. She later attended Michigan State University for her Masters in Political Ecology with an emphasis on the effects of land degradation, working to understand how landmines cause land degradation. Read more

Gabe Brown – Dirt to Soil – USA

Gabe Brown is one of the pioneers of the current soil health movement which focuses on the regeneration of our resources. Gabe, along with his wife Shelly, and son Paul, own and operate Brown’s Ranch, a diversified 5,000 acre farm and ranch. The ranch consists of several thousand acres of native perennial rangeland along with perennial pastureland and cropland. Their ranch focuses on farming and ranching in nature’s image. Read more…

Alfred Brownell – Green Advocates International – Liberia/USA

Alfred Lahai Gbabai Brownell is a Liberian environmental activist and lawyer. Under threat of violence, Brownell stopped the clear-cutting of Liberia’s tropical forests by palm oil plantation developers. His campaign protected 513,500 acres of primary forest that constitute one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots. He currently lives in exile in Brooklyn. Read More.

Berta Cáceres (1971-2016) – Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras [COPINH] – Rio Blanco, Honduras

Berta Cáceres was an Indigenous woman from the Lenca community in Rio Blanco, Honduras, and a Goldman prize recipient in 2015. She died defending her community from the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque river by DESA, one of the world’s largest dam builders. Her case is unique because it marks one of the first instances where the authorities have actually charged and convicted the men responsible for her death. But, the intellectual authors of her murder have yet to be charged or arrested. Her family and friends continue to seek justice. Read more

Wendy Campbell-Purdie (1925-1985) – Woman Against the Desert – Africa

Born and raised in New Zealand in the 1920’s, Wendy Campbell-Purdie branched out internationally and launched several successful tree-planting projects in Africa. She was a pioneer, an international tree-planting leader, and her work was rooted in awareness of the value of trees and associated biodiversity in halting the spread of the desert, providing food (directly and indirectly) for people and livestock, and creating a microclimate that made rain more likely. Read more…

Robert “Amigo Bob” Cantisano (1951-2020) – Ecological Farming Conference – California, USA

Amigo Bob Cantisano was one of the most widely experienced and influential figures in California organic agriculture and is perhaps best known as the founding organizer of the annual Ecological Farming Conference, which is the largest sustainable- agriculture gathering in the Western United States. Read more…

Gonzalo Cardona Molina – ProAves – Tolima, Colombia (Deceased)

Gonzalo Cardona Molina (1966-2021) dedicated more than two decades of his life to the protection of the endangered species, the Yellow-eared parrot (Ognorhynchus icterotis). Since 1998, he worked at the “Reserva ProAves Loros Andinos” in the central mountain region of Colombia. He was the first environmental leader killed in 2021 in Colombia. Better known as Gonza, he began with ProAves at its founding, serving as the first forest guard for the organization. His mission for two decades was to help the species flourish. Gonza championed the birds, and took on the risk of his life’s work with passion and vigor. Read more

Joan Carling – Indigenous Peoples Rights International – Cordillera, Philippines

Joan Carling is an indigenous Filipino human rights activist and environmentalist who has defended the rights of native and marginalized peoples for over two decades. She has served as Secretary General of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) and has chaired the Cordillera People’s Alliance in the Philippines. Carling has also contributed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and REDD+ activities and has served as a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFii). Read More

George Washington Carver (1864-1963) – Agricultural Pioneer – USA

George Washington Carver was an African American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton (like peanuts and sweet potato), methods to prevent soil depletion, and to improve the lives of impoverished farmers. He believed in the interconnectedness between the health of the land and the health of the people who lived on it. Read more…

David Chapoloko (“Mr. Green”) – Art 4 Climate & Passion For Greens – Zambia

David Chapoloko is a Climate Change Activist, an Environmentalist, Forester & Agronomist, a social entrepreneur, and an Author of the book ‘Taking the Dream to Higher heights’. He is commonly called ‘Mr Green’, a name given to him by his local community as a symbol of his continued support towards a green environment. He also teaches students how to repair – rather than throw away – broken objects. He has big plans and he next aims to build greenhouses entirely out of litter! More

Chikukwa Project – Zimbabwe, Africa

For the last 20 years, villagers in this area have taken their lives and futures into their own hands with the permaculture-informed restoration of watersheds, farmland and culture. Where once the people of the Chikukwa villages suffered hunger, malnutrition and high rates of disease, this community has turned its fortunes around using permaculture farming techniques. Now they have a surplus of food and the people in these villages are healthy and proud of their achievements. Their degraded landscape has been turned into a lush paradise. Read more…

Bishop Simon Chiwanga – LEAD Foundation – Tanzania

Retired Bishop Simon Chiwanga has been strongly committed to reforestation over a number of years. He had tried closing a hill to human interventions with a disappointing result and in 2005, with the Jitume Foundation community groups, planted two million trees but most died and the groups started to disintegrate. After attending a Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration Workshop in Moshi, Tanzania in March and the Beating Famine Conference in Nairobi in April, his newfound understanding of FMNR rekindled his determination and he returned to Mpwapwa with renewed zeal to restore degraded farms and hills. Read more

Dr. (Master) Cho – Natural Farming – South Korea

Dr. (Master) Cho of South Korea is a farmer that founded Natural Farming in the 1960s. His systematic and scientific inquiry enabled him to identify the great potentials of the concept and strategy of Farming with Indigenous micro-organisms (IMO). Dr. Cho tried to show an alternative way of farming that assured both high yield and good quality, a nature- respecting farming that superceded the chemical intensive agriculture which had just begun to spread in South Korea at that time. Read more…

Youngsang Cho – JADAM Organic Farming – South Korea

Youngsang Cho was born in Korea and is bringing farming back to the farmers; to restore the farmers’ sovereignty in technology; spread an ultra-low cost method of farming; and ultimately open a new world where farmers, consumers and mother nature are in harmony. He studied chemistry and horticulture and then founded JADAM in 1991 meaning “people that resemble nature”. Read more…

Park Chung-Hee (1917-1979) – President – South Korea

Park Chung-Hee led the reforestation of South Korea after the Korean war. Normally politicians aren’t mentioned in honors lists for ecology, but here is a notable exception as South Korea is one of the world’s best models of national reforestation. Before his presidency, he was a military leader in the South Korean army, and was the second-highest ranking officer in the army. He first came to power after leading a military coup in 1961, which brought an end to the interim government of the Second Republic. He was assassinated in 1979. Read more…

Storm Cunningham – RECONOMICS Institute – USA

Storm Cunningham is thought to be one of the world’s most prolific leaders on active community revitalization and natural resource restoration. For over two decades he has helped public and private clients around the globe understand how to lead or support resilient prosperity by coaching them on harnessing the latest trends, resources, and opportunities of the fast-growing $3 trillion global restoration economy. He advises mayors, governors, members of U.S. Congress, and executives of foundations, non-profits and corporations. In these confidential roles, he normally stays in the background, so his clients can take full credit when they launch leading-edge policies and initiatives. But in his role as keynote speaker and workshop leader he’s very much in the foreground of our minds. Read more…

Darren Doherty – Regrarians Platform – Australia, International

Darren J. Doherty is a 5th generation Bendigo region land manager, developer, author & trainer and has been involved in the design & development of over 3000 projects across 6 continents in more than 50 countries, ranging from 1 million hectare cattle stations in Australia’s Kimberly region to 110,000 acre Estancia’s in Patagonia, EcoVillage developments in Tasmania to public: private R&D agroforestry & education projects in Vietnam, novel AG Machinery development + family farms across the globe with a range of private, corporate, government & non-profit clients. Read more…

The Eden Project – Cornwall, UK

The Eden Project iseducational charity and social enterprise with the global mission to create a movement that builds relationships between people and the natural world and to demonstrate the power of working together for the benefit of all living things. This project showcases human’s dependence on plants and demonstrates technological ingenuity and the regeneration of landscapes and livelihoods. Read more…

Balgis Osman Elasha – African Development Bank – Sudan

Balgis Osman Elasha is a Sudanese climate scientist who studies the effects of climate change in Africa and promotes sustainable development and climate change adaptations. She was a lead writer on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report that garnered the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a Nobel Peace Prize, and she was named a 2008 United Nations Environment Programme Champion of the Earth. Read more

Dr. Masaru Emoto (1943 – 2014) – Hidden Messages in Water – Japan

Dr. Masaru Emoto was a Japanese businessman, author and scientist who claimed that human consciousness could affect the molecular structure of water; that water can react to positive thoughts and words and that polluted water could be cleaned through prayer and positive visualization. Emoto said that water was a “blueprint for our reality” and that emotional “energies” and “vibrations” could change its physical structure. Read more…

Boris Ersson – Documentary Filmmaker – Sweden

Boris Ersson is perhaps best known for his film, “Battle of the Elms,” which depicts the Elm Conflict, a public protest turned violent dispute, starting May 11, 1971. He is currently producing a series of films about the people who are currently dedicating their lives to saving some of the finest forests on Earth. One such video is of the “Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary” and their efforts in preserving, supporting, and enriching their local forests. Read more…

Michael Evenari (1904-1989) – Challenge of a Desert – Israel

Michael Evenari was an Israeli botanist originally from Germany. Evanari figured out the secrets of the ancient Nabatean runoff agriculture systems in the Negev Desert. One of the best examples of ancient, sophisticated water harvesting systems and how he recreated aspects of it today. The Negev, first published in 1971, told the story of some twenty years of study of southern Israel’s desert. It synthesized the findings of botanists, geologists, soil scientists, agronomists, archaeologists, historians, and engineers and told how the applications of their work produced an agricultural surplus in this forbiddingly dry, hot region. Read more…

Thröstur Eysteinsson – Icelandic Forest Service – Iceland

Thröstur Eysteinsson spent his childhood exploring Iceland’s bountiful natural world. His grandfathers were active volunteers in the country’s forestry societies, which he later joined while working as a high school science teacher. As he learned more about the history of forestry in Iceland, his interest grew. He quit his job as a teacher and enrolled at the University of Maine, where he earned his master’s degree in forestry in 1990 and Ph.D. in forest resources in 1992. Read more

Alan Watson Featherstone – Trees for Life – Scotland, UK

Alan Watson Featherstone is an inspirational public speaker, ecologist, nature photographer and writer based in the Findhorn Community in the northeast of Scotland. He has given lectures and workshops all over the world and spoken at various international conferences including the World Wilderness Congress, the Society for Conservation Biology annual conference and the Society for Ecological Restoration conference. He has also spoken for us in the Global Earth Repair Conference. Amongst many other accolades, in 1986 he formed Trees for Life with the aim of restoring the Caledonian Forest and its unique wildlife to the Scottish Highlands. Read more…

Findhorn Ecological Community – Scotland

Findhorn Community is a leading international centre of transformative learning, rooted in a spiritual ecovillage community in the north of Scotland. It has been home to thousands of residents from more than 40 countries. The Foundation offers a range of workshops, programmes and events in the environment of a working ecovillage. The Foundation’s belief in sustainability is expressed in the built environment with ‘ecological’ houses, innovative use of building materials such as local stone and straw bales, and applied technology in the Living Machine sewage treatment facility and electricity-generating wind turbines. The Ecovillage is intended to be a tangible demonstration of the links between the spiritual, social, ecological and economic aspects of life, for use as a teaching resource. Read more…

Ron Finley – “Gansta Gardener” – The Ron Finley Project – Los Angeles, CA USA

Armed with a shovel, some soil and seeds, Ron Finley has come to be known as the “Gangsta Gardener” and his unexpected tactics have made him one of L.A.’s most widely known artivists. He is a former fashion designer turned gardening enthusiast (“renegade gardener” as some call him). Frustrated by his community’s lack of access to fresh, organic food, Finley inadvertently started a revolution when he turned the parkway in front of his South Central L.A. home into an edible garden in 2010. Read more

John Francis – “The Planetwalker” – New Jersey USA

John Francis is an American environmentalist nicknamed The Planetwalker. Born in Philadelphia, the son of a West Indian immigrant, he moved to Marin County, California as a young man. In the early 1970s John Francis gave up using motorized vehicles after witnessing the devastating effects of an oil spill in San Francisco Bay. Soon Afterwards he took an even more radical step: a vow of silence that lasted 17 years, during which he undertook a pilgrimage by foot across America on behalf of the environment and world peace, earning his Ph.D. in environmental studies along the way. Through his silence and walking, he learned to truly listen, both to other people and the world around him. Read more

Masanobu Fukuoka (1913 – 2008) – Natural Farming, Seed Balls – Japan

Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, herbicide and pesticide free cultivation methods from which he created a particular method of agriculture, commonly referred to as “natural farming” or “do-nothing farming” – shizen nōhō (自然農法) and is also referred to as the Fukuoka Method. In the international development of the organic farming movement, Fukuoka is considered to be amongst the “five giant personalities who inspired the movement” along with Austrian Rudolf Steiner, German-Swiss Hans Müller, Lady Eve Balfour in the United Kingdom and J.I. Rodale in the United States. Read more…

Chotresh Kumar Ganguly “Bablu” – Timbuktu Collective – India

Choitresh Kumar Ganguly (“Bablu”) isan organic farmer in India who has been involved in the field of rural development in India since the late 1970s, helping empower small holder farmers, agricultural labourers, Dalits (low caste) and other disadvantaged and marginalised communities, artisans, women, children and People with Disabilities. In 1990 he co-founded the not for profit, Timbaktu Collective, and established the 32-acre ‘Timbaktu’ agro-forest habitat and intentional community. Since then, they began to regenerate and revive the local economy, enhance livelihood opportunities, help regain food security and food sovereignty, and work on large-scale ecological restoration. Read more…

Gaviotas Community – Colombia

Gaviotas Community is located in the Llanos of the Colombian department of Vichada. It was founded in 1971 by Paolo Lugari who assembled a group of engineers and scientists in an attempt to create a mode of sustainable living in one of the least hospitable political and geographical climates in South America. When these original donors began to pull funding from Gaviotas in the 1990s, the villagers looked elsewhere for their income. They realized that the impressive pine forest was a sustainable source of pine resin used in the production of a wide variety of products like turpentine and violins. Read more…

Jean Giono – Author of The Man who Planted Trees – France

Jean Giono (1895-1970) was one of France’s greatest writers. His published works include over 30 novels, including our favorite, The Man Who Planted Trees; a timeless eco-fable about what one person can do to restore the earth. At just under 4,000 words, it tells the story of a shepherd’s solitary efforts to reforest a desolate region in the foothills of the Alps during the first half of the 20th century. Like Giono’s own life, the shepherd’s story spans two world wars and the bloodiest half-century in human history. Read more…

Dr. Jane Goodall – Jane Goodall Institute – UK

Dr. Jane Goodall, an Ethologist and Conservationist, has shown the world the urgent need to protect chimpanzees from extinction by redefining species conservation to include the needs of local people and the environment. Her field research at Gombe transformed our understanding of chimpanzees and redefined the relationship between humans and animals in ways that continue to emanate around the world. In April 2002, Goodall was named a UN Messenger of Peace. She took an unorthodox approach in her field research, immersing herself in their habitat and their lives to experience their complex society with emotions and long-term bonds. Read more…

Homero Gómez González (1969-2020) – El Rosario Monarch Reserve – Ocampo, Michoacan, Mexico

Homero Gómez González was a Mexican environmental activist, agricultural engineer, and politician. He was the manager of El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, a component of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. He used social media to share images of monarch butterflies. He led efforts to keep loggers out of the reserve and organized marches, demonstrations, and anti-logging patrols. He worked with the government to increase the stipend local farmers could receive for preserving trees. Gómez managed 150 hectares of reforested land. He encouraged 260 communal land owners to reforest corn fields. Read more

Dr. Thomas Goreau – Global Coral Reef Alliance – USA

Dr. Thomas J. Goreau is a marine biologist promoting coral reef protection by documenting stresses to reef ecosystems, identifying the causes of these stresses and proposing strategies to restore these species-rich and highly sensitive ecosystems. He has worked extensively on the coral reefs of Jamaica and continues to conduct research on the impacts of global climate change, pollution, and new diseases in reefs all across the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific. His current work focuses on coral reef restoration, fisheries restoration, shore line protection, renewable energy, community based coral reef management, mariculture, soil metabolism, and stabilization of global carbon dioxide. Read more…

Ernst Götsch – Syntropic Agriculture – Switzerland

Ernst Gotsch is a Swiss farmer and researcher working mostly in Brazil. He has originated a system of climate and biodiversity friendly sustainable farming techniques known as syntropic agriculture or dynamic/successional agroforestry. The practice of Syntropic Agriculture focuses highly on regeneration by use through already existing, even denatured or farmed out, ecosystems. With special emphasis on soil formation and regulation of micro-climate water cycles, this particular practice utilizes local ecosystem processes for restoring nature-that-was. Read more…

Project GreenHands – Southern India

An inspiring ecological initiative of the Isha Foundation, Project GreenHands seeks to prevent and reverse environmental degradation, and enable sustainable living. The project aims to create 10% additional green cover in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. Drawing extensively on people’s participation (currently including over 2 million volunteers) hundreds of millions of trees have been planted state-wide. Read more…

Anil K. Gupta – Honey Bee magazine – India

Anil K. Gupta is an Indian scholar and pioneer in the area of grassroots innovations. He is the founder of the Honey Bee Network, now in it’s 28th year. He is also a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. His contribution includes documenting people’s knowledge with the help of teams of volunteers spread across India. He helps grassroots innovators and communities build on their knowledge systems by providing help in filing patents, promoting scientific validation of these innovations by involving government scientific institutes and private individuals and bodies, and facilitating tie-ups with entrepreneurs and industrial groups. Read more…

Nizar Hani – Shouf Biosphere Reserve – Chouf Region, Lebanon

Nizar Hani works with holistic ecosystem management, which includes civic engagement and local community involvement to protect nature and improve integrated ecosystem services such as sustainable agriculture and forest fire prevention through biomass management. As Lebanon’s population continues to grow, Nizar works to manage ecosystems threatened by climate change, tourism, and urbanization in a sustainable manner. With this in mind, Nizar also values natural resource management working with local communities in the stewardship of the Reserve, both in principle and for the practical economic benefit of the community. Read More

Anna Hazare – Ralegan Village Re-greening – India

Indian social activist Anna Hazare was awarded the “Padma Bhushan” in 1992 (the third-highest Civilian Award by the Government of India) for his efforts in establishing the “Utopian” village of Ralegan Siddhi, which is internationally heralded as a Model of Environmental Conservation. Under Hazare’s leadership, Ralegan Siddhi has accomplished a complete reversal from destitution and poverty, to full sustainability, by several environmentally stable means. Examples include digging canals to retain rainwater, tree planting, and terracing to reduce soil erosion. For power, they utilize solar power, bio-gas, and a windmill. Read more…

Wouter Helmer – Rewilding Europe – Nijmegen, Netherlands

Wouter Helmer, co-founder and Director of Rewilding Europe, is described as ‘an instigator of modern ecology, a brilliant and connecting thinker and a great communicator.’ His understanding of ecosystems and ‘trust’ in natural processes, the connection with relevant socio-economic factors, and his cooperation with a wide range of (often non-conservation oriented) partners has generated many successes. Read More

Charles and Perrine Hervé-Gruyer – Miraculous Abundance – France

Charles and Perrine Hervé-Gruyer are a “power couple” that decided to become low impact farmers in 2006 with their Bec Hellouin Permaculture Farm. The couple was untainted by knowledge of conventional western practices and took on the principles of permaculture as well as varied sources and practices of the 19th century Parisian Market Gardener’s, Amazonian tribes people, and Asian Efficient Micro-organisms (EM) related practices. Read more…

David Holmgren – Permaculture, RetroSuburbia – Australia

David Holmgren is the other original “co-founder of Permaculture” and also co-author (with Bill Mollison) of the book, “Permaculture One,” published in 1978, which inspired the entire movement. Bill and David lived together for a period of three years, collaborating on their garden and developing the basis for the work that has inspired so many of us. David has written 8 more titles, since, including “Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability” in 2002. More recently, he wrote the book Retrosuburbia to lay out a path for the current permaculture transition of our suburbs to abundant regenerative agriculture and holistically-integrated systems of life, matter and energy. Read more…

Sepp Holzer – Agro-Ecology – Austria

Sepp Holzer is a farmer, an author, and an international consultant for natural agriculture. After an upbringing in a traditional Catholic rural family in Austria, he took over his parents’ mountain farm business in 1962 and became well-known for his use of ecological farming, or permaculture, techniques at high altitudes after being unsuccessful with regular farming methods. Read more…

Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947) – Organic Farming Movement Founder – UK

Sir Albert Howard was the founder of the organic farming movement. Starting as a Plant Scientist in England, he worked for 25 years as an agricultural investigator in India, first as Agricultural Adviser to States in Central India and Rajputana, then as Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, where he developed the famed Indore composting process, which put the ancient art of composting on a firm scientific basis. Read more…

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim – Indigenous Women of Chad – Chad, Africa

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim is one of the founders of the Association of Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad, a group fighting to defend the environment and the rights of indigenous people. The Mbororo, which means “cattle herder”, are an ethnic subgroup of 250,000 members of the Fulani, the largest nomadic people in the world, inhabitants of central and western Africa. Read more…

Dr. Elaine Ingham – Soil Food Web – USA

Elaine Ingham is an American microbiologist with a “user-friendly” approach. Elaine has knowledge on how to ensure a healthy foodweb to promote plant growth and reduce reliance on inorganic chemicals. While truly an academic, Elaine is also passionate about sharing her knowledge and research findings with those at the grass roots level of working with soils. That includes not just farmers who grow crops, but also those who graze cattle, sheep and other livestock, fruit and vegetable growers, green keepers, parks and gardens workers, nursery operators – in fact anyone who grows things, even if it’s just plain old lawn grass.Elaine offers a way forward for sustainable farming. Read more…

Wes Jackson – The Land Institute – USA

Wes Jackson is founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute. He established and served as chair of one of the country’s first environmental studies programs at California State University-Sacramento. Wes is widely recognized as a leader in the international movement for a more sustainable agriculture. Life magazine included him as one of 18 individuals predicted to be among the 100 important Americans of the 20th century. He argues that one of the most important lessons that we as a species urgently need to learn is that we cannot continue to impose our hubris on the world around us. Read more…

John Jeavons – Grow Biointensive – USA

John Jeavons is a leader in the field of Biointensive agriculture. He developed the small-scale, high-yielding, resource-conserving “GROW BIOINTENSIVE Sustainable Mini-Farming” method—an approach that allows small farmers to increase yields, build fertile soil up to 60x faster than nature, and use 66% less water per pound of food, compared with conventional practices. Read more…

Fatima Jibrell – Sun Fire Cooking – Somalia

Fatima Jibrell is a Somali-American environmental activist. She was the co-founder and executive director of Adeso, co-founder of Sun Fire Cooking, and was instrumental in the creation of the Women’s Coalition for Peace. Spurred on by the civil war in Somalia that began in 1991, Jibrell along with her husband and family friends co-founded the Horn of Africa Relief and Development Organization, colloquially referred to as Horn Relief, a non-governmental organization (NGO) for which she served as the executive director. Read More

Lyla June Johnston – Regeneration Festival – Navajo Nation, USA

Lyla June Johnston studies the global cycles of violence that eventually gave rise to The Native American Holocaust and the destruction of many cyclic relationships between human beings and nature (intercultural, intergenerational trauma). Her passion lies in revitalizing spiritual relationships with Mother Earth and cultivating spaces for forgiveness and reconciliation to occur between cultural groups. She is a walker within the Nihigaal Bee Iiná Movement, a 1,000-mile prayer walk through Diné Tah (the Navajo homeland) that is exposing the exploitation of Diné land and people by uranium, coal, oil and gas industries. Read more…

William R. Jordan III. – Ecological Restoration Journal – Wisconsin, USA

William “Bill” Jordan is an American botanist and journalist who has played a leading role in the development and critique of ecological restoration as a means of developing an environmentalism that is philosophically more coherent, psychologically more productive, politically more robust, and ecologically more effective. His critique has had a significant influence on environmentalism in the United States and abroad. His strategies uniquely revolve around viewing humanity’s relationship with Nature as a “performing art,” and his work as the basis for a “new communion” with the Earth. Read more…

John Kaisner – The Natural Farmer – India

John Kaisner is a much-loved international teacher, designer and practitioner of Permaculture. But it wasn’t always this way. He spent the first 20 years of his career in architecture, where he designed and completed projects in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and India. His permaculture journey began in the villages of India – recharging groundwater, building clay stoves, and teaching impoverished villagers how to grow food using zero budget natural farming. One of the things that makes John’s approach exceptional is the way in which he integrates natural farming into traditional Permaculture practices. Read more…

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka – Conservation Through Public Health: Gorilla Conservation Coffee – Uganda

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is a Ugandan veterinarian and founder of Conservation Through Public Health, an organisation dedicated to the coexistence of endangered mountain gorillas, other wildlife, humans, and livestock in Africa. Kalema-Zikusoka was Uganda’s first wildlife veterinary officer and was the star of the BBC documentary, Gladys the African Vet. In 2009 she won the Whitley Gold Award for her conservation work. Read More

John Kempf – Advancing Eco Agriculture – Ohio, USA

John Kempf is an entrepreneur, speaker, podcast host and teacher in the field of biological and regenerative farming. He is passionate about the potential of well managed agriculture ecosystems to reverse ecological degradation. He founded Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA 2006), a plant nutritionist biostimulants consulting company, to deploy his deep knowledge of sustainable horticulture in a way that makes it easy for fellow farmers to change their growing habits. By working with international industry leaders, John has assembled a systems-based approach to plant nutrition based on physiology, mineral nutrition, and soil microbiology. Read more…

Dr. José Sarukhán Kermez – National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO) – Mexico

Dr. José Sarukhán Kermez is a plant biologist and ecologist and is recognized for his ability to translate scientific knowledge into action by creating and strengthening educational and policy institutions which have rallied the public to protect biodiversity in Mexico, with ripples that have spread worldwide. Often referred to as the founding father of ecological research in Mexico, Professor José Sarukhán is among the best-known ecologists and conservation scientists in the world. Read More

F.H. King (1848-1911) – Professor and “Agricultural Scientist” – USA

Author of “Farmers of Forty Centuries,” Franklin Hiram King lived from 1848-1911. King is most popularly known for designing the cylindrical storage silo, but due to his work in “Agricultural Physics,” he is known to us as one of the great “Fathers” of Organic Gardening. F.H. King is commemorated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison by “King Hall,” so renamed in 1934, which is the very same Agricultural Physics Hall in which he professed, and currently home to the “Agricultural Engineering Department.” There the “F. H. King Students for Sustainable Agriculture” exists; a student organization that grows and donates crops in order to raised awareness of sustainable farming and gardening. You may find his book here: https://store.doverpublications.com.

Maria Kolesnikova – MoveGreen – Kyrgystan

Maria Kolesnikova is the director of MoveGreen, a youth environmental movement in the Kyrgyz Republic. Together with her colleagues, she promotes environmental awareness across the country and advocates for more and bolder environmental-friendly policies. During COVID-19, she has taken her activism online, and for Earth Day, a social media campaign is challenging people to take seven actions for the environment while they stay at home. Read more

Patricia Kombo – PaTree Initiative – Kenya

Patricia Kombo founded the PaTree Initiative to help Kenya achieve ten per cent forest cover by getting students to plant trees. So far, her initiatives have managed to plant more than 5,000 trees. She visits schools across Kenya, mentoring students in tree planting and establishing environmental clubs. Working closely with her community, she also set up kitchen gardens and trained locals in sustainable farming and land conservation techniques to improve agricultural practices and help achieve zero hunger, zero poverty and gender equality. More

Rishi Kumar – Sarvodaya Institute – California, USA

Rishi Kumar is a small-scale farmer, land-artist, writer, and educator. Since 2010, he has been working in the field of urban gardening and farming in Los Angeles (Sarvodaya Farms), where he has helped create and establish hundreds of urban gardens. His work centers on the healing of people and Earth as one body. Read more…

Brad Lancaster – “Planting the Rain” – Washington State, USA

Brad Lancaster has taught, designed, and consulted on regenerative-design systems of permaculture and integrated water-harvesting systems in seven countries since 1993. He created and lives on a thriving solar-powered 1/8th-acre (0.05-ha) urban oasis in downtown Tucson, Arizona, which harvests 100,000 gallons (378,000 liters) of rainwater a year where just 12 inches (280 mm) falls from the sky. Brad’s dynamic books, talks, workshops, and living example have inspired tens of thousands of people to ‘plant the rain’ to sustainably grow their local resources. Read more…

Ricardo Landazuri – EnviroPro – Peru

Ricardo Landazuri is an Environmental Engineer implementing a project that restores degraded soils on the coast of Peru. Ricardo founded EnviroPro, a company that provides green tech solutions to the public and private sectors in Peru. The company develops customized tools that allow farmers to save money and obtain better and sustainable results. More

Geoff Lawton – The Permaculture Research Institute – Australia

Geoff Lawton is a world renowned Permaculture consultant, designer and teacher. Lawton was British born and now resides in Australia. He first took his Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course in 1983 with Bill Mollison the founder of Permaculture. Geoff has undertaken thousands of jobs teaching, consulting, designing, administering and implementing, in 6 continents and close to 50 countries. Read more…

Eugenio “Ego” Lemos – Permaculturalist and Singer-Songwriter – East Timor

Eugenio Lemos is an environmental activist and musician. He is the founder of the first national organization dedicated to permaculture in East Timor, Permatil, which is leading the effort to publish the Tropical Permaculture Guidebook. Lemos is also the founder of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and Organic Agriculture Movement in Timor-Leste and a lecturer in Sustainable Agriculture and Public Arts & Culture at the University of Timor-Leste. Read more…

Andre Leu – Regeneration International – Australia

Andre Leu is the International Director of Regeneration International, which promotes food, farming and land use systems that regenerate and stabilize climate systems, the health of the planet and people, communities, culture and local economies, democracy and peace. Regeneration International works with numerous agricultural systems such as agroecology, organic, permaculture, ecological agriculture, holistic grazing, biological agriculture, organic agriculture and agroforestry. Read more…

Francisca Linconao – Mapuche Spiritual Leader – Padre Las Casas, Chile

Francisca Linconao is a machi, a Mapuche spiritual leader, and a human rights activist. She was the first Indigenous woman to successfully appeal to the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention. She sued the logging company and was able to stop the deforestation of the forest next to her community. In 2013, she, along with 10 other Mapuche community leaders, was accused of killing a couple due to a house fire. Read more

Andy Lipkis – TreePeople – Los Angeles, CA, USA

Andy Lipkis is a practical visionary who has dedicated his life to healing the environment while improving the lives of individuals and communities. He founded TreePeople in Los Angeles in 1973 at age 18 and continues to serve as its President. The TreePeople organization advocates and works to support sustainable urban ecosystems in the Greater Los Angeles area through education, volunteer community-based action, and advocacy. Read more…

John D. Liu – Ecosystem Restoration Camps – America, China, International

John D. Liu is is an American ecologist and filmmaker and one of the world’s most eloquent spokesperson for global earth repair. This Chinese-American filmmaker travels widely and works with people and institutions in several countries. John has worked with Commonland Foundation on catalyzing privately invested large-scale restoration worldwide since 2009, and is currently its Ecosystem Ambassador. John also founded the Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement in 2016, which has grown to currently 37 camps in 6 continents and continues to grow. Read more…

Chief Oren Lyons – Onondaga Nation – USA

Chief Oren Lyons is a Native American Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan living in Onondaga, NY. He was a founding member in 1977 of the Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth: this council of respected Indian leaders meets annually to provide an avenue for Native American culture to inform and contribute to contemporary cultural and political debate. For more than fourteen years he has taken part in meetings in Geneva of Indigenous Peoples of the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. Read more…

Louise Mabulo – The Cacao Project – San Fernando, Philippines

Louise Emmanuelle de Guzman Mabulo is a Filipino environmentalist, farmer, social entrepreneur and chef. She is the founder of The Cacao project, a seed-exchange and social business that works with over 200 farmers from the San Fernando area in the Philippines. Part of her advocacy efforts are directed towards changing the perceptions that people have over farmers and agriculture, particularly removing the stigma that farmers are poor, uneducated and have failed in traditional educational systems. Read More

Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) – Green Belt Movement – Kenya, Africa

Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan social, environmental and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She went on to become the first woman in East and Central Africa to become a Doctor of Philosophy (veterinary anatomy, her dissertation on the development and differentiation of gonads in bovines). In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organisation focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. Read more…

Dr. Ángela Maldonado – Fundacion Entropika – Leticia, Colombia

Ángela Maldonado has dedicated her life to the conservation of our planet and stopping illegal wildlife trade. She is on the board of Fundacion Entropika, an NGO working for the long-term conservation of the Colombian Amazon through community led education and research. Since her first encounter with the rainforest, Maldonado’s life took a sharp turn and she became an expert in the conservation of primates. For this, she lives in the shadow of constant threats and can only be in the same place for a short period of time. Read more

Celina Suárez Mantilla – Water Defender – Santurban, Colombia

Feminist activist Celina Suárez Mantilla is a water defender and has been part of the civic committee to protect the water and páramo of Santurbán, Colombia. Suárez Mantilla is aware of the risks that come with her work. The activist isn’t planning to leave her homeland herself. Páramos are unique ecosystems and the source of 70 per cent of Colombia’s drinking water. Suárez Mantilla is resolute in defending one of them in particular, Santurbán, which supplies water to around 3 million people in the country’s northeast. Read more

Dennis Martinez – Indigenous Peoples’ Restoration Network – USA

For over 40 years, Dennis Martinez has contributed extensively to the cause of ecological and cultural restoration at the local, national and international levels. A community organizer, educational speaker and author, Martinez is recognized as a leader in bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Western science. Read more…

Zipporah Matumbi – Meru Forest Environment Conservation and Protection Association (MEFECAP) – Upper Imenti Forest, Kenya

Zipporah Matumbi lives adjacent to the Upper Imenti Forest, part of the Mt Kenya forest ecosystem. As an adult, she noticed that with extensive logging, the forest was disappearing. Deforestation was affecting rainfall, and local women were particularly affected by this since they have to go long distances looking for water. So she gathered a group of women to start tree nurseries, using their own time and money, to save the forest around them and make a difference. Read more

Charlie McGee – Formidable Vegetable Soundsystem – Australia

Charlie McGee is the most famous permaculture singer in the world as a ukulele-strumming ecological troubadour. He independently founded the band, Formidable Vegetable Sound System, which is sowing the garden of our minds with the seeds of change to ‘turnip the beets’ for people, plants and the planet. They are dedicated to inspire local action for global issues and now find themselves firmly planted in the fertile soils of the growing regenerative movements worldwide. Read more…

Vladimir Megre – Author of “The Ringing Cedars of Russia” Series – Russia

Vladimir Megre is a Russian entrepreneur and writer best known as the author of the “Ringing Cedars of Russia” series of books, of which the first and most well-known volume is “Anastasia.” Since the 1990s this series has been extremely influential in giving rise to several socio-religious movements. One of the central ideas communicated by the series is encouraging the creation of a garden and ancestral dwelling on a plot of land (ideally at least one hectare in size, per family), what Megre refers to as a “kin’s homestead.” Read more…

Rohit Mehra – Green Man of Ludhiana – Punjab, India

Meet Rohit Mehra an IRS officer who has turned crusader for the environment. Rohit has created 25 mini forests ranging from 500 sq feet to 4 acres within just two years! He was named the Green Man of Ludhiana when he successfully created a vertical garden at the Ludhiana Railway station. After that he went on to create 75 vertical gardens in Punjab. Read more…

Ilarion Merculieff – Global Center for Indigenous Leadership – Alaska, USA

Ilarion (Larry “Kuuyux”) Merculieff is an Indigenous messenger and teacher. He is one of the last generation of Aleuts of the Alaskan Pribilof Islands to be fully raised in the traditional way. Kuuyux, a name given once a generation, means extension, like an arm extending from a body. His work now extends internationally, as he facilitates the use of traditional ways of dialogue, decision-making and consensus building, and talks about Indigenous elder wisdom for modern times. Larry helped secure recognition of Alaska Native subsistence fishing rights, and to develop culturally- based adaptation strategies for the impact of climate change. Read more…

Beau Miles – The Backyard Adventurer – Gippsland, Victoria, Australia

Beau Miles is an Australian YouTuber, educator, author, and outdoorsman as well as an Award winning filmmaker. With a PhD in Outdoor Education, a string of successful short films under his belt, Beau’s exploits are funny, authentic, insightful and being copied all over the world. Beau recently released his first book: The Backyard Adventurer, to great acclaim. In it, he explores the idea of conscious experimentation with adventure, making meaning and inspiration out of tins of beans, bits of rubbish, elbow grease and backyard spaces. Read more

Akira Miyawaki – Miyawaki Model – Japan

Akira Miyawaki is a Japanese botanist and expert in plant ecology specializing in seeds and the study of natural forests. Since the 1970s he has been active worldwide as a specialist in the restoration of natural vegetation on degraded land. Referring to potential natural vegetation (PNV), a concept he studied in Germany, he developed, tested and refined a method of ecological engineering today known as the Miyawaki method: to restore native forests from seeds of native trees on very degraded soils which were deforested and without humus. Read more…

Bill Mollison (1928-2016) – Permaculture Institute – Australia

Bill Mollison was a co-founder of what we now commonly refer to as “Permaculture.” He also founded the original Permaculture Institute, established in 1979, to teach the practical design of sustainable soil, water, plant, and legal and economic systems to students, worldwide. We owe him much! Read more…

Dr. Simon Moolenaar – Commonland – Netherlands

Dr. Simon Moolenaar is an expert in sustainable soil and land management and has been working on environmental and sustainability themes in various roles: as researcher, strategic consultant, project manager, process manager and program manager. As Head of Science & Education at Commonland he actively connects science & business with multiple stakeholders in ecosystem and landscape restoration projects that aim for the returns of inspiration and of social, natural and financial capital (the “4 returns”). Read more…

Rosemary Morrow – Blue Mountains Permaculture – Australia

Rosemary Morrow trained in agricultural science and rural sociology and after spending time in Africa, she realized there needed to be a better alternative to conventional agricultural practices. She found this in the ethics and integrated applied science of permaculture, and has been teaching permaculture ever since. For almost 40 years Rosemary has worked extensively with farmers and villagers in Africa, Central and South East Asia and Eastern Europe. Read more…

Mulindwa Moses – Believe Youth – Kampala, Uganda

Mulindwa Moses is a climate and environmental justice advocate from Uganda involved in lobbying for environmental laws, enforcing the pre-existing ones or protesting and publicly opposing harmful projects. He is the founder of Believe Youth, which aims to create climate resilient societies and to empower Uganda’s youth. Read more

Goran N’Diaye – Kaydara Agro-Ecological Farm – Senegal, Africa

Goran N’Diaye of Senegal is a pioneer and master of permaculture demonstrated by growing a lush oasis in the desert. He is the Director of the Kaydara agro-ecological farm located in Sine Saloum of Senegal. His story begins with finding water 4 meters below the ground in a very dry part of the country. He bought the land for the price of a loaf of bread and began farming. It started with a single coconut tree, even though his community thought he was crazy, he showed that it’s not a miracle…he simply saw change and implemented it. Read more…

Gary Paul Nabhan – Relocalizing Food – USA

Gary Paul Nabhan is an agricultural ecologist, Ethnobotanist, and author whose work has focused primarily on the plants and cultures of the desert Southwest. He is considered a pioneer in the local food movement and the heirloom seed saving movement. Nabhan was raised in Indiana, and even dropped out of high school. He worked at the headquarters for the first Earth Day in Washington D.C. Read more…

Anand Dhawaj Negi (1947-2021) – Cold Desert Forestation – India

Anand Dhawaj Negi, popularly known as AD, was a retired bureaucrat turned “Forest man of Kinnaur” who left an evergreen legacy and miraculous story in the cold desert of India by developing a lush forest spread over 100 hectares in the high-altitude border district of Himachal Pradesh. Read more…

Nemonte Nenquino – Waorani Nation – Ecuador

Nemonte Nenquino is an indigenous Waorani woman who has committed herself to defending her ancestral territory, ecosystem, culture, economy, and way of life. She led an indigenous campaign and legal action that resulted in a court ruling protecting 500,000 acres of Amazonian rainforest and Waorani territory from oil extraction. Nenquimo’s leadership and the lawsuit set a legal precedent for indigenous rights in Ecuador, and other tribes are following in her footsteps to protect additional tracts of rainforest from oil extraction. Read more…

Helena Norberg-Hodge – Local Futures – Sweden

Helena Norberg-Hodge is a linguist, author, producer and filmmaker, and the founder and director of Local Futures. A pioneer of the “New Economy” movement, and the convenor of World Localization Day, this non-profit organization is determined to encourage us to recognize the benefits of economic localization. She is a leading proponent of localization as an antidote to the problems arising from globalization, and founded the International Alliance for Localization (IAL) in 2014. Read more…

Kristin Ohlson – The Soil Will Save Us – USA

Kristin Ohlson is a freelance journalist, author, essayist and fiction writer, almost no topic escapes her curiosity. Her articles have spanned many subjects, from zebrafish bioengineered to glow in the presence of pollutants, to abandoned coal mines that catch fire and burn for decades, to feminist philanthropy, to the biology of moral decision-making, to watching Indian soap operas with a roomful of men in Kabul. Read more…

Jeff Orlowski – Exposure Labs – Boulder, Colorado USA

Jeff Orlowski is a Filmmaker and served as director, producer, and cinematographer of the Sundance Award-Winning films, Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral. He is a two-time Emmy-Award winning filmmaker, and founder of the award-winning production company Exposure Labs. His latest film, The Social Dilemma, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Read More

El Hadji Salifou Ouédraogo – The Baobab Man – Burkina Faso, Africa

El Hadji Salifou Ouédraogo has nurtured thousands of baobab trees from tiny seeds to expansive forests for the past 47 years. The trees in turn help his family, his village and the Earth. He has planted more than 3000 Baobabs in his life. Read more…

Latifa Oumlil – Perma Atlas Foundation – Morocco, Africa

A notable permaculturalist and educator currently working on an Earth Repair project in Anguelz, Morocco, Latifa Oumlil is the founder of the Perma Atlas Foundation which has significantly aided in the “re-greening” of the Atlas Mountains. This program enables the local population to cope with prolonged droughts and gigantic flash floods caused by global climate change. Read more…

Samson Parashina – Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust – Kenya

Samson Parashina, a Maasai warrior, son of a local chief and respected safari guide, has shown amazing commitment to developing sustainable green economy models for Kenya’s Kuku Group Ranch, land communally owned by the Maasai community. He is a respected safari guide while leading the Maasai Conservation Wilderness Trust (MCWT) with his extensive knowledge of the wilderness, wildlife, and culture. Read More

Jadav Payeng – The “Forest Man” – India

Jadav Payeng is an environmental activist and forestry worker popularly known as the Forest Man of India. Payeng singlehandedly planted an entire forest on Majuli Island, India’s largest island. To date, he has spent over 30 years planting over 40 million trees, thereby creating an entirely man-made forest by ecologically reversing a barren desert sandbar of the Brahmaputra, and covering an area of 550 hectares of land! Read more…

Autumn Peltier – Water Warrior – Manitoulin Island, Ontario Canada

Autumn Peltier is Anishinaabe-kwe and a member of the Wikwemikong First Nation and an internationally recognized advocate for clean water. She is a water protector and has been called a “water warrior”. Peltier addressed world leaders at the UN General Assembly on the issue of water protection at the age of thirteen in 2018. She began her advocacy on behalf of water at the age of eight and was inspired by her great aunt, Josephine Mandamin. Read more

Leah Penniman – Soul Fire Farm – USA

Leah Penniman has over 20 years of experience as a soil steward and food sovereignty activist, and with farmers internationally in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico. Li co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2010 with the mission to reclaim our inherent right to belong to the earth and have agency in the food system as Black and Brown people. Her areas of leadership at Soul Fire include farmer training, international solidarity, perennials, writing, speaking, “making it rain,” and anything that involves heavy lifting, sweat, and soil originally focused on a farm share for low-income people. Read more…

Didi Pershouse – Land & Leadership Initiative – USA

Didi Pershouse is Founder and Lead Educator for Land & Leadership Initiative; Coordinator, Researcher and Writer for Seed Media Project; and is an author and soil sponge strategist. She is also the founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine and developed a practice and theoretical framework for systems-based ecological medicine—to restore health to people as well as the environmental and social systems around them. After 22 years of clinical work with patients, Pershouse now travels widely in North America and Europe as a speaker, teacher, and consultant. Read more…

Carlo Petrini – Slow Food – Italy

Carlo Petrini has profoundly articulated and re-shaped our contemporary understanding of food, its production, its inter-relationship with the environment and our wellbeing. Petrini came to prominence two decades ago when he stopped McDonald’s opening by Rome’s Spanish Steps. His non-lethal weapon of choice at the time? Plates of penne. Petrini coined the term “eco-gastronomy” to describe his vision of good food sustainably produced. Read more

Zephaniah Phiri Maseko (1927-2015) – Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands – Zimbabwe, Africa

Zephaniah Phiri Maseko was a Sustainable Farmer and Water Conservationist. For over 40 years Zephaniah Phiri Maseko lived, farmed, and raised a family in one of the most arid and resource-poor lands in southern Africa, Zimbabwe’s Zvishavane District. Through his own ingenuity and despite political challenges, he and his family turned a wasteland into an oasis: devised and propagated irrigation practices that enabled subsistence farmers on marginal lands to prosper as they conserve scarce resources and practice sustainable farming. Read more…

Michael Pilarski – Friends of the Trees Society, GERF – Washington State, USA

Our founder, Michael Pilarski, has been making waves in the international ecosystem restoration and regenerative agriculture for decades. Michael is a regenerative farmer by trade, teaching hundreds through his example garden at Finn River Cidery in Chimacum, WA. His sustainable herb business, Friends of the Trees Botanicals, shares its name with Friends of the Trees Society, which he founded in 1978. Read more…

Peter Proctor (1928-2018) – Biodynamic Agriculture – New Zealand, India

Peter Proctor (1928-2018) was one of the most respected and influential figures in contemporary Biodynamics. He was born in 1928 in New Zealand. His passions took him to India, where he found a much more receptive, fertile ground, as mentioned in the recent Biodynamics journal. His work there was essential in establishing what has become a very vibrant biodynamic community. The connections he saw between Biodynamic gardening and food, therapy, spirituality, education and improved physical and spiritual human health was clear and, in his words “that was that for me. Read more…

Alfredo Quarto – Mangrove Action Project – USA

Alfredo Quarto is the Founder of the Mangrove Action Project (MAP), a nonprofit which collaborates internationally with all levels of academia and policy makers to preserve, restore, and educate about our world’s mangrove forests. Mangroves sequester and store more carbon than any other forest type per hectare. These forests also provide a host of other benefits to the world at large – including providing local and native food sustainability, and natural barriers against Hurricanes and Storms. Read more…

Mazin Qumsiyeh – Palestinian Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability – Palestine

Mazin Qumsiyeh is a scientist, author and activist, and is the founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University where he teaches. He started off in the field of medicine working in the USA, but returned to Palestine in 2008. Qumsiyeh formerly worked at Duke University and Yale in the medical field. He returned to Palestine in 2008, where he established the PMNH. Read more…

Rowan Reid – Agroforestry Pioneer – Australia

Rowan Reid is the founder, owner, and self-acclaimed “consultant” of the Bambra Agroforestry Farm, (essentially a 42-hectare outdoor classroom for scientists, students and farmers alike) in the Otway Ranges of Australia. Rowan refers to this project as having created his own “living laboratory for learning.” Established over 20 years ago, the Farm has hosted over 10,000 visitors from all walks. Read more…

Dr. Chris Reij – Sustainable Land Management – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Dr. Chris Reij was honored by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) as “Global Drylands Champion” in 2013. An ardent supporter of the work of the Global Restoration Initiative, he has worked in Africa since 1978. Although Chris has maintained a focus on the West African Sahel, he has also been involved in numerous studies and consultancies in other parts of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. He is currently a Sustainable Land Management specialist and a “Senior Fellow” of the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC. Read more…

Tony Rinaudo – Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration – Niger, FMNR, Africa

Tony Rinuado is an Australian agronomist, who is widely known as the “forest maker.” Having lived and worked in African countries for several decades, he has discovered and put in practice a solution to the extreme deforestation and desertification of the Sahel region. With a simple set of management practices, farmers can regenerate and protect existing local vegetation, which has helped to improve the livelihoods of millions. Read more…

Delphine Robbe – Gili Eco Trust – Indonesia

Delphine Robbe is a marine and land Conservationist actively involved in the protection of reefs and environment of the Gili Islands of Indonesia. She is a French national who specializes in Coral propagation, coral nurseries, Biorock reef restorations and reef gardening. She shares her passion via workshops and educational events, presentations; working with locals, including the children and volunteers; networking with other environmental organizations; and consulting the Indonesian government for sustainable practices. Read more…

Dr. Ahmed Salah – The Organic Pharmacist – Sinai, Egypt

Dr. Ahmed Salad is known simply as “the Doctor” despite his lack of professional credentials or formal medical training. Amid the harshest and most unforgiving of Earth’s terrains, Ahmed tends to a medicinal garden of over 472 plants and herbs, 19 of which are unique to his area and 42 of which exist precariously as endangered species. Relying only on the plants he grows and tends to, Ahmed cares for his family, members of his community, tourists who happen upon his farm by chance over the course of their travels, and pilgrims who visit Saint Catherine’s Monastery from various countries around the world after hearing of his work — all seeking a cure from the illnesses and afflictions that ail them. Read more…

Joel Salatin – Polyface Farm – Virginia, USA

Joel Salatin calls himself a “Christian Libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.” Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the High Priest of the Pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Salatin draws on a lifetime of food, farming and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. He’s as comfortable moving cows in a pasture as addressing CEOs in a Wall Street business conference. His wide-ranging topics include nitty-gritty how-to for profitable regenerative farming as well as cultural philosophy like orthodoxy vs. heresy. Read more…

Datu Sangcoan – Tribes and Nature’s Defenders – Philippines

Datu Lanelio Sangcoan is a self-described eco warrior helping protect indigenous tribes living deep in the forests of the Philippines. He is the founder of Tribes and Natures Defenders Inc., the organization serving to conduct correspondence with the rest of the world in order to do this work preserving the biodiversity and indigenous life-ways of the rainforest there. He is active on social media as well as consistently working with the tribes to develop self-sustaining regenerative agriculture projects deep in the forest, using traditional forest gardening methods to provide food security for the people. Read more…

Joey Santore – Crime Pays, but Botany Doesn’t – California, USA

Perhaps our favorite botanist to watch and learn from, Joey Santore offers us a bit of a different spin on the world of botany with his informative and hilarious (often PG-13) YouTube channel. Joey travels around the world and takes you on plant walks, with “colorful” commentary. He’s published 492 videos, and has over a quarter million subscribers. Joey is extremely interested in natural evolutionary adaptation, observing how plants evolved into different forms and determining how and why each one got to be exactly where they are. Read more…

Allan Savory – Savory Institute of Holistic Management – Zimbabwe, Africa

Allan Savory is a Zimbabwean scientist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated Holistic management, a systems thinking approach to managing resources. Savory had studied the relationships between animals and the land in the savannah of Africa and advocates using bunched and moving livestock for biomimicry, as a means to heal the environment. He believes grasslands hold the potential to sequester enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to reverse climate change. Read more…

Yacouba Sawadogo – The Green Wall of Africa – Burkina Faso, Africa

Yacouba Sawadago is famed for being “The Man who Stopped the Desert”, as for the relentless work he has done to coax a forest out of desert-like soil in the country. In Burkina Faso, he deployed the unique earthworks method known as Zaï, creating holes and stone lines in the surface of the desert which would trap water and organics from running off with erosion. In so doing, he brought great feats of ecosystem restoration and abundance to these lands and the people who live there. Read more…

Ranil Senanayake – Analog Forestry – Sri Lanka

Dr. Ranil Senanayake, popularly known as the “Snake Man,” is the nephew of the first ever Prime Minister in Sri Lanka, and the man who in 1981 revived “organic” farming in a small but powerful way. Already a world-renowned environmentalist, Sayanake’s passion for traditional organic farming led him to transplant his expertise in Africa and South America, back to his homeland. There, he took a degraded tea estate in Mirahawatta, Bandarawella and transformed it into “analog forestry,” a concept of ecological restoration which mimics natural forests to create socio-economically productive, wholesome and self-sustaining landscapes. His original 17-acre forest now boasts of sustainable organic farming along with lush, magnificent tree cover. Read more…

Hugo Schiechtl (1922-2002) – Bioengineering – Austria

Hugo Meinhard Schiechtl was an Austrian architect, engineer, botanist, professor, author, vegetative cartographer, and painter. He stood out for describing, painting and inventorying the alpine vegetation and, especially, for his work in the control of erosive processes and the perennialization of water courses and stabilization of slopes using vegetative measures. In this aspect, he was responsible for creating a new field of investigation and work, Natural Engineering (Bioengineering). His well known book, Bioengineering for Land Reclamation and Conservation, is one of the best textbooks on the topic of stopping erosion with a combination of plants and structures. Read more…

Judith Schwartz – Cows Save the Planet – USA

Judith Schwartz is a journalist whose work explores nature-based solutions to global environmental, social, and economic challenges. She showcases the ways in which nature itself can heal the wounds we have inflicted on our planet by telling stories to explore and illuminate scientific concepts and cultural nuance. Read more…

Afroz Shah – Afroz Shah Foundation – Mumbai, India

Afroz Shah is an Indian environmental activist and lawyer from Mumbai. He is best known for organizing the world’s largest beach clean-up project, which has grown into a movement that has inspired people around the world to clean up their surrounding environment. Read More

Manavendra Singh Shekhawat – The Story of Dhun – India

Manavendra Singh Shekhawat changed the fortune of a 500 acre barren, degraded landscape (only 30 trees on it) using traditional water wisdom. He works in the fields of heritage conservation, design, agriculture, sustainability and social entrepreneurship. His projects are a representation of a unique way of life, carefully preserving traditions of the past yet framing them in a modern idiom. His hotels take the path less travelled, and his NGO “I Love Jaisalmer” was responsible for launching Jaisalmer’s largest cleanliness and conservation drive. He believes in India and its endless possibilities. Through his work, he wants to create mediums that can help maximise human potential. Read more…

Mark Shepard – Forest Agriculture Enterprises – USA

Mark Shepard is the CEO of Forest Agriculture Enterprises, founder of Restoration Agriculture Development (RAD), and award-winning author Mark has also been a farmer member of the Organic Valley cooperative, the worlds largest Organic Farmer’s marketing co-op, since 1995. RAD is a full-service environmental consulting, research, and development firm committed to developing agricultural ecosystems that provide nutritious food for humankind while enhancing the life-supporting ecosystem services of planet Earth. Read more…

Vandana Shiva – Navdanya – India

Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and anti-globalisation author. She is often referred to as “Gandhi of grain” for her activism associated with the anti-GMO movement. Shiva cites data allegedly demonstrating that today there are over 1400 pesticides that may enter the food system across the world. Vandana Shiva was born in Dehradun, India. Her father was a conservator of forests, and her mother was a farmer with a love for nature. Read more…

Rajendra Singh – Tarun Bharat Sangh – India

Rajendra Singh is an Indian water conservationist and environmentalist from Alwar district, Rajasthan in India. Known popularly as the “Water Gandhi,” or “Water Man of India”, Rajendra Singh has been instrumental in fighting the slow bureaucracy, mining lobby and has helped villagers take charge of water management in their semi-arid area as it lies close to Thar Desert, through the use of johad, rainwater storage tanks, check dams and other time-tested as well as path-breaking techniques. Singh assists the Indian Government with empowering planning, financing, monitoring and coordinating authority for the Ganges River. Read more…

Boyan Slat – The Ocean Cleanup – Delft, Netherlands

Boyan Slat is a Dutch Inventor and entrepreneur who creates technological solutions to global problems. He is the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup; a foundation which develops advanced systems to rid world’s oceans of plastic. In 2011, aged 16, Slat found more plastic than fish while diving. He made ocean plastic pollution the subject of a high school project examining why it was considered impossible to clean up. He later came up with the idea of building a passive plastic catchment system, using circulating ocean currents to net plastic waste, which he presented at a TEDx talk in Delft in 2012. Read More

Willie Smits – The Orangatans’ Best Friend – Borneo

In 1989, while working as a forest researcher in Indonesia, microbiologist Willie Smits first encountered a baby orangutan being sold at market, and later found it abandoned on a rubbish heap. This was a turning-point in his career. Taking the orangutan home, he nurtured it back to health, and was soon given other orangutans to look after. This work of rescuing, rehabilitating and releasing orangutans into the wild developed into what was to become the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS). Read more…

J. Russell Smith (1874-1996) – Father of Agroforestry – USA

J. Russell Smith (1874-1996) was an American geographer and is considered the father of the field of agroforestry. In 1929, he released his book Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, one of the best reference books on agroforestry and forest farming, and noted as a key inspirational source for Bill Mollison in creating the Permaculture Design concept. This book is a highly readable blueprint for the development of high-yield tree crops proves that vast, untapped food sources can be harvested from common species of North American trees. Smith’s philosophy is based on the idea that agriculture must be adapted to physical conditions and that farming should fit the land. Read more…

Neal Spackman – Regenerative Resources – USA

Neal Spackman is a Terraformer, an internationally recognized pioneer of hyper-arid agro-forestries. Neal is the director of the Al Baydha Project in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, where he and local Bedouin tribesmen designed and built an agroforestry system to convert deserts into savannahs. This project restores ecological function, increases biodiversity, creates soil, improves water resources, and establishes agricultural production despite severe desertification. Read more…

Paul Stamets – Fungi Perfecti – USA

Paul Stamets is an American mycologist and entrepreneur who sells various mushroom products through his company. He is an author and advocate of medicinal fungi and myco-remediation. He began his career in the forest as a logger. Stamets is largely self-taught in the field of mycology. Stamets plays a significant part in the 2019 documentary film Fantastic Fungi. Paul believes that mushrooms can save our lives, restore our ecosystems and transform other worlds. He believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet. Read more…

Rudolph Steiner – Biodynamic Farming – Austria

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of the biodynamic approach to agriculture, was a highly trained scientist and respected philosopher in his time, who later in his life came to prominence for his spiritual-scientific approach to knowledge called “anthroposophy.” Long before many of his contemporaries, Steiner came to the conclusion that western civilization would gradually bring destruction to itself and the earth if it did not begin to develop an objective understanding of the spiritual world and its interrelationship with the physical world. Steiner’s spiritual-scientific methods and insights have given birth to practical holistic innovations in many fields, including education, banking, medicine, psychology, the arts and, not least, agriculture. Read more

Omar Tello – “The Forest Man” – Puyo, Ecuador

Omar Tello is known locally as “The Forest Man,” who grew a piece of the Amazon rainforest. Ordained a ‘humble maverick’ at four-years-old, Tello grew up surrounded by nature. However, as adult life came upon him, the wild was replaced by the world of accounting. Working for a bank, Tello felt like a prisoner. Then in 1980, as Ecuador lost thousands of square miles of rainforest due to oil companies, he found his escape. Purchasing a rainforest pasture in Puyo, Tello began restoring Amazonian fauna and flora. Read more

Chief Jake Teraronianeken Swamp (1946-2010) – Mohawk Nation, USA

Chief Jake Teraronianeken Swamp was aNative American Peace Advocate of the Wolf Clan and sub-chief of the Kahniakehaka, Mohawk Nation. Chief Jake Swamp traveled around the world meeting with world leaders and community groups to share the Tree of Peace ceremony and spread the Iroquois wisdom surrounding Peacemaker Principles and the Thanksgiving Address. Read more…

Olga Speranskaya – Scientist for Chemical Safety Program at the Eco Accord Center – Russia

Olga Speranskaya is a Russian scientist and environmentalist. She has been the Director of the Chemical Safety Program at the Eco-Accord Center for Environment and Sustainable Development in Moscow since 1997 and holds a master’s degree in Geophysics from Moscow State University, and a doctorate in Environmental physics from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Read More

Maria Taant – Environmental Protector – Ecuador Rainforest (Deceased)

María Taant was a Shuar leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon. She fought for their ancestral lands and the rights of the women of Amazonia. ⁠The women of the Amazon – from the Kichwa, Shuar, Achuar, Shiwiar, Waorani, Sapara and Mestizo peoples – had gathered to tell a story of negotiation and struggle, as they sought to redefine their place in the family and in wider society. For many years, they had been cultivating knowledge and resistance in their territories and communities. Read more

Rodrigo Tot – Protectionist/Activist – Agua Caliente, Guatemala

Rodrigo Tot is an indigenous Q’eqchi leader in Guatemala. He represents an isolated, small Q’eqchi farming and fishing community of about 270 members in the long-running fight to secure legal ownership over their communal lands. He is the recipient of the 2017 Goldman Environmental Award for leading his community to a landmark court decision that ordered the government to issue land titles to the Q’eqchi people, and keep destructive nickel mining from expanding in his community. Read more

Isabella Tree – Knaepp Castle Estate – UK

Isabella Tree is a conservation pioneer that has proved that if nature is allowed to take its own course, magic happens. She and her husband, Charlie Burrel brought the 3,500 acre Knepp Castle Estate back to life by letting it grow wild and abandoning the history of industrial and dairy farming. Their story is one of environmental hope. Up until the early 2000s, the land was polluted and degraded and then she turned the former farm’s depleted, loss-making land into the site of the largest rewilding experiment in lowland England: an experiment that has produced astonishing wildlife successes in a relatively short space of time and offers solutions for some of our most pressing problems – like soil restoration, flood mitigation, water and air purification, pollinating insects and carbon sequestration. Read more…

Nancy Turner – Ethnobotanist – British Columbia

Nancy Turner is an author and Emeritus Professor. She is plausibly the most notable North American “ethnobiologist” active today! Especially through her extensive on-site works with North American indigenous peoples, Dr. Turner has proven that the common term of “hunter-gatherers” is a woefully inadequate descriptor of Native practices for food gathering. Her works illustrate ancient, developed, and complex systems for managing and enhancing plant and animal populations, including propagation. Read more…

Daniel Valdiviezo – Navi Village – Mexico

Daniel Valdiviezo is an Ecosystem Restoration Developer and Biomimicry Designer. He combines design thinking, consciousness, and an inclusive viewpoint allows him to innovate and facilitate creative solutions. He is the Co-creator of Navi Village, the first regenerative community in Mexico. Read more…

Sheila Watt-Cloutier – Centre for International Governance Innovation & Inuit Circumpolar Council – Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a Canadian Inuit Activist and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. She is in the business of transforming public opinion into public policy. Experienced in working with global decision-makers for more than a decade, Watt-Cloutier offers a new model for 21st-century leadership. She speaks with passion and urgency on the issues of today — the environment, the economy, foreign policy, global health, and sustainability — not as separate concerns, but as a deeply interconnected whole. At a time when people are seeking solutions, direction, and a sense of hope, this global leader provides a big picture of where we are and where we’re headed. Read More…

Jean Wiener – Fondation pour la Protection de la Biodiversité Marine (FoProBiM) – Haiti

Jean Wiener is a Haitian marine biologist. He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for his efforts in successfully creating the Three Bays National Park, the country’s first marine protected area to preserve the swath in Haiti’s northern coast, while working with the community to promote sustainable fishing practices. Read More

Zachary Weiss – Elemental Ecosystems – USA

Notable protégé of Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, Zachary Weiss is the Founder and President of the group Elemental Ecosystems, provide an action-oriented process to improve clients’ relationship with Water and landscape. Zach was the first person to earn a “Holzer Practitioner Certification” directly from Sepp, after a rigorous two-year apprenticeship working in both North America and Europe. Read more…

John Wick – Marin Carbon Project – California, USA

John Wick is co-owner of the Nicasio Native Grass Ranch and the Marin Carbon Project and serves as its tireless spokesperson and advisor, which aims to improve carbon sequestration in rangeland, agriculture, and forest soils through applied research and implementation. Even beyond sequestering carbon, which is a massively necessary endeavour, large scale application of carbon farming techniques has the potential to transform agriculture in many other ways, increasing productivity as well our relationship to the land. Read more…

Ina Wilkie – Kambashu Institute – Windhoek, Khomas, Namibia & Germany

Ina Wilkie set out to address food insecurity in Namibia’s biggest informal settlement. Here, on the outskirts of the capital city of Windhoek, women find themselves unemployed and vulnerable, yet empowered to create a secure life for themselves and their families. Ina is now the Director of Kambashu Institute, which trains and designs with shack dwellers for shack dwellers. This organization believes everyone should get a chance to improve their lives as there is a gap between people who want to improve their lives and their access to designing and creating. Read More

Joost Wouters – The Seaweed Company – Spain

Joost Wouters is an entrepreneur, speaker, author and the “SeaEO” of the Seaweed Company. Joost and his team aim to implement CO2-reducing seaweed-based business models at large scale. He is also co-instructor on the Ecosystem restoration design course through Gaia Education. Read more…

Percival A. Yeomans – Keyline Plow – Australia

P.A. Yeomans (1905 – 1984) was an Australian inventor known for the Keyline System for the development of land and increasing the fertility of that land. Keyline design accounts for the natural formation of a given landform and maximizes the water storage and fertility. The keyline plow lowers the soil horizon and creates deep channels where water can permeate. His Keyline principles or concepts (Keyline Design) have been adopted by farm owners in almost every country in the world. Yeomans’ Keyline concepts are now part of the curriculum of many sustainable agriculture courses in colleges and universities across the world. Read more…

Bill Zeedyk – “Stream Restoration Wizard” – New Mexico, USA

Bill Zeedyk is a “River Re-creator,” and the Principal author of “Let the Water Do the Work: Induced Meandering.” Bill introduces us to his concept of “Induced Meandering”, the process of repairing waterways using stone “baffles“ to purposely nudge and redirect moving water’s flow. Read more…

Bertha Zuniga – Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras [COPINH] – Rio Blanco, Honduras

Bertha Zuñiga is an environmental and indigenous rights activist in Honduras. She is the daughter of the late Berta Cáceres, an award winning environmentalist and indigenous rights leader who was murdered a week after receiving threats for opposing a hydroelectric project. Co-founded and formerly led by her mother, Zuñiga is now the leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), an indigenous rights organization that works to defend the environmental, cultural, economic, social, health, educational, and indigenous rights of the Lenca people. Read more

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