In 1997, the village of Pattuvam in Kannur District of Kerala, India, created history. They declared their absolute ownership over all the genetic materials currently growing within the village area. They announced that biodiversity belonged to the current and future generations of the village. Nobody could access the genetic material without the people’s permission. A…
Category: Movement
051. Vijay Jardhari and Beej Bachao Andolan: Saving indigenous seeds
Vijay Jardhari Vijay Jardhari is a farmer and social activist of Jardhargaon, a village in the Tehri-Garhwal district of Uttaranchal in north India. In the late 1980s, he realized that modern agriculture was destroying traditional farming. In Garhwal, there were once more than 3000 varieties of rice alone, but just a few varieties were promoted…
049. Johnny Appleseed: Planting apple nurseries all his life
Johnny Appleseed (Image from Howe’s Historical Collection) Johnny Appleseed was born as John Chapman in Massachusetts, US, in 1774. Not much is known about his family except that his mother died when he was young and that his father fought in the American Revolutionary War. He is known in the US as the legendary outdoorsman…
046. Anna Hazare: Gandhian fight against corruption in India
Anna Hazare Kisan Baburao Hazare, affectionately called Anna Hazare, comes from a poor family in Maharashtra, India. He joined the Indian Army as a driver and had an epiphany of sorts in 1965 when all of his comrades were killed in action and he alone survived in an incident at the Khemkaran border. Transformation of…
045. Laurie Baker: The man who built for the people
Laurie Baker Meeting Gandhiji Born in England, Laurie Baker (1917-2007), a British Architect, worked during World War II in an ambulance unit in China, Japan and Burma. When he was in India sometime in the early 1940’s, he had a chance encounter with Mahatma Gandhi, which changed his life. In 1945, he came to India…
043. Rajendra Singh: Making rivers come back to life
Rajendra Singh “Build a johad!” On Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday in 1985, five young men led by Rajendra Singh got off the bus at Kishori Village in Alwar, Rajasthan, India. They belonged to the Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), founded by Singh. They had come to the village “wanting to fight injustice against all people”, but had…
042. Women of Dangejheri: Forming patrols, protecting the forest
Women of Dangejheri (Cover of an IUCN Journal) Dangejheri is a village in the Ranapur Block of Nayagarh District of Odisha State, India. The village has 30 odd households dominated by the Kondh tribe. As in many parts of Orissa, the forests on the hillocks around Dangejheri had all but vanished by the 1970s. The…
041. Ken Saro-Wiwa: Victim of Nigerian oil and martyr for the cause of the Ogonis
Ken Saro-Wiwa Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995) was a Nigerian writer, television producer, and environmental activist. He belonged to the Ogoni people, who are an ethnic minority in Nigeria. Once oil was found in the Ogoniland of the Niger Delta in the 1950s, millions of tonnes of crude oil have been extracted from the region by multinational…
040. Granny D: Walking 3200 miles for election finance reform
Granny D Can one do extraordinary things late in life, if one becomes driven by a public cause? Granny D showed us that it was possible. In her early years, Doris Haddock (1910-2010), who came to be known as Granny D, was housemaker, who raised two children during the Great Depression and later worked at…
037. Sundarlal Bahuguna: A gentle warrior fights for the Himalayas
Sundarlal Bahuguna “Himalaya is a land of penance. Nothing in the world can be achieved without penance. I am doing this on behalf of all who are striving to save our dying planet. Why should a river, a mountain, a forest, or the ocean be killed, while we cling to life?” This is what Sunderlal…