Tulsi Gowda, who is from Honnali village in Karnataka, had planted more than 30,000 saplings. Born in a Halakki Vokkalu tribal community, she did not receive a formal education or learn to read. But, she speaks the language of the forest and is known as the “Encyclopedia of the Forest” for her impeccable knowledge about forest and plants. She received Padma Shri Award, country’s fourth highest civilian award, in 2021 for devoting her life towards conservation of trees and forest. Goddess of Forest- Padma Shri Tulsi Gowda

Masanobu Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. His seminal book, “The One-Straw Revolution”, describes his life’s journey, his philosophy, and farming techniques. He is a giant leader in the worldwide sustainable agriculture movement. His influences went beyond farming to inspire individuals within the natural food and lifestyle movements. He was an outspoken advocate of the value of observing nature's principles.

Masanobu Fukuoka Talks About the One Straw Revolution

We are manufactured landscapes,
constructed through naming nouns-
we celebrate difference.
We are compelled into being one or the other,
like a nail or a hammer.

We reference nature through motherhood,
voluptuous in her national pride narrative
her lips red pucker supple metaphors like her fertile ground,
her belly always pregnant
ready to plant desire in discourse.

We forget her industrial miscarriages,
her toxic tar-sulfur consumption
her global half-bred garbage in words left unsaid
her ***** laundry in patriarchal hands.

We forget her midwives,
her toiling underpaid worker
who support generations of waste
Who spit up truth in plastic mouthfuls,
Who regurgitate material narratives
to celebrate flesh in mythic wholeness.

When will the nation, earth and world step from its subject of motherly
pedestal and name its androgynous existence, its forgotten lifelines?

Carly Salzberg

Cheruvayal K. Raman is an Indian tribal farmer from Wayanad district, Kerala. He is known as the guardian of rare seeds. Without having any knowledge of conventional sciences like agriculture science or botany, he is known for conserving over 55 rice varieties on his small farm at Kammana. This 70-year Old Farmer's Lifelong Mission is to Save Kerala's Traditional Rice Varieties. He was conferred with Padma Shri, fourth highest civilian award, in 2023 for devoting his life to conserve traditional rice seeds.

Thimmakka, also known as Saalumarada Thimmakka or Aala Marada Thimmakka for her work, is an Indian environmentalist from the state of Karnataka. She is known for her work in planting and tending to 385 banyan trees along a forty-five-kilometre stretch of highway between Hulikal and Kudur. She has also planted nearly 8000 other trees. She was conferred with Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian award, in 2019. Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education in the U.S is named after her. Saalumarada Thimakka The Green Crusader

Dharampal was instrumental in changing the understanding of pre-colonial Indian education system. Dharampal primary works are based on documentation by the colonial government on Indian education, agriculture, technology, and arts during the period of colonial rule in India. His comprehensive research into the field of indigenous education in India was well documented in his much acclaimed book- “The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the 18th century”. Dharampal embarked on what turned out to be a life-long mission to look for archival materials of eighteenth and nineteenth century pertaining to the functioning of Indian society and polity prior to the European conquest of India and the way they were transformed subsequently under the British rule.

The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Education in 19th Century India

"India’s destiny lies not along the bloody way of the West, of which she shows signs of tiredness, but along the bloodless way of peace that comes from a simple and godly life. India is in danger of losing her soul. She cannot lose it and live. She must not therefore lazily and helplessly say, ‘I cannot escape the onrush from the West.’ She must be strong enough to resist it for her own sake and that of the world."

European civilization is no doubt suited for the Europeans, but it will mean ruin for India, if we endeavor to copy it.”

My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization

She is an author and activist. She has been called a pioneer in the concept of ecopsychology—the belief that promoting environmentalism is healthy. She is a social-change activist with an emphasis on feminism, bioregionalism, and indigenous rights. The central themes of her writings include a critique of mass technological society as contrasted by sustainable, nature-based cultures. She is a psychotherapist and shows how we can use trauma recovery and deep ecology, along with the wisdom of native cultures, to reclaim our innate wholeness.

Trauma That Is Our Culture

Jean Liedloff, spent two and a half years in the South American jungle living with Stone age Indians named the Yequana. The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is. In her famous book on parenting, “The Continuum Concept-In search of Happiness Lost (1975)”, she offers a new understanding of how we have lost much of our natural well-being and shows us practical ways to regain it for our children and for ourselves.

The Continuum Concept

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

SHelena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of the international non-profit organisation, Local Futures, "dedicated to the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide." Helena worked with the people of Ladakh, to find ways of enabling their culture to meet the modern world without sacrificing social and ecological values. 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. She has helped to initiate localization movements on every continent, particularly in South Korea and Japan, and co-founded both the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network. In 1986, Norberg-Hodge was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize') in recognition of her work in Ladakh.

Ilarion 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, represents a carrier of ancient knowledge into modern times, a messenger. He invokes indigenous perspectives and ancestral wisdom to guide us through modern times. His elders say that the leadership of women is paramount to transform civilization to conserve Earth’s capacity to sustain life. For his entire career, Merculieff has been a passionate advocate for indigenous rights/wisdom, and harmonious relationship with the Earth Mother.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

What Plants Can Teach Us - A Talk with Robin Wall Kimmerer

Ali Manikfan is a Marine Researcher, Ecologist, shipbuilder, astronomer, agriculturist, polyglot, all without any formal education. According to him, formal education is artificial and pointless and best way to acquire knowledge is getting wisdom by observing our environment. He was conferred with Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian award, in 2021 for his contribution at grassroots level innovations across diverse fields.

THE MAN IN MILLION

Neil postman was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers, mobile devices, and cruise control in cars, and was critical of uses of technology, such as personal computers in school. He is best known for his social critique of mass communication, especially television, with respect to its effects on the developing minds of children. Postman believed that by mistaking technological progress for human progress, we have lost the ability to direct our lives toward higher pursuits. In our age of technology and mass media, he argued, we indulge in the endless pursuit of appetite upon appetite, stunting individuals and stultifying society.

Jadav Payeng was born in the indigenous Mishing tribe of Assam. He is an environmental activist and forestry worker from Majuli, popularly known as the Forest Man of India. Over the course of several decades, he has planted and tended trees on a sandbar of the river Brahmaputra turning it into a forest reserve. The forest, called Molai forest after him, is located near Kokilamukh of Jorhat, Assam, India and encompasses an area of about 1,360 acres / 550 hectares. In 2015, he was honoured with Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India. Jadav's story inspired a children's book, Jadav and the Tree Place, that tells his story of how he made a forest that is now home to wild animals. His inspirational story is also being taught in ecology classes at schools across the United States.

THE FOREST MAN OF INDIA

Illich's critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. He argued that the overuse of the benefits of many modern technologies and social arrangements undermine human values and human self-sufficiency, freedom, and dignity.

Ivan Illich on 'Deschooling'

Rajendra Singh born on 6th of August 1959 is a 62-year-old environmentalist who is an Ayurvedic medicine graduate and post-graduate in Hindi literature. After completing his studies, he joined government service in 1980, and started his career as a National Service Volunteer for education in Jaipur, from where he was appointed to oversee adult education schools in the Dausa district in Rajasthan. This is where he joined the Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) initially formed with an intention to aid victims of a campus fire. However, in 1984 the whole organization was left to him this was that turn that lead him into this conversationalist world.

Shlain begins with the assumption that "when a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship What the Alphabet Engenders / The Alphabet vs the Goddess

Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist, anthropologist and United Nations Messenger of Peace. She was interested in animal behaviour from an early age, left school at age 18. She is known for her exceptionally detailed and long-term research on the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Her groundbreaking discoveries shaped our understanding of what it is to be human. In 1977 she cofounded the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation (commonly called the Jane Goodall Institute). According to her, “Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.”

Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of his book “The Master and His Emissary”, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. The book deals with the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain. The differing world views of the right and left brain (the "Master" and "Emissary" in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.

The Master and His Emissary:

The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,

Marshall McLuhan analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. In his work “Understanding Media”, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium that people tend to focus on the obvious to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. In his famous work, “The Medium is the Message”, he summarizes his view of the potent influence of printing presses, television, computers, and other electronic disseminators of information in shaping styles of thinking and thought, whether in sociology, art, science, or religion. His main argument is that the new technologies exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects social interactions—"fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook".

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message - 1977 part 1 v 3

Elizabeth Kolbert is a journalist and author, best known for her groundbreaking work on science, climate change and the environment. In her writing, Kolbert frequently examines the relationship between organisms, people, and the sea in the context of climate change. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, in which Kolbert offers portraits of threatened and extinct species to illustrate the diverse and devastating impacts of climate change on flora and fauna and implicates the human species for today's climate change scenario.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children

And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Kahlil Gibran - 1883-1931

“Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood
Move to an infant drinking milk,
To a child on solid food
To a searcher after wisdom,
To a hunter of more invisible game.
Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, 'The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
And orchards in bloom.
At night there are millions of galaxies,
And in sunlight the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.'
You ask the embryo why he, or she,
Stays cooped up in the dark with eyes closed.
Listen to the answer.
'There is no 'other world.'
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating.'"

Rumi

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong,
consuming herself, unabashed.
Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.
Having died of self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.

Mathnawi VI, 1967-1974

on understanding

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir,
to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that
are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given you because
You would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along, some distant day, into the answer”.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I fear so deeply the words of mankind

I fear so deeply the words of mankind.
They utter them all with so certain a sound:
and this we call house and that we call hound,
and here is before, and there is behind.

I fear too their thinking, their mocking disdain.
They know the whole past, all things that will be.
For them, no mountain is wondrous to see;
their properties border on God's own domain.

Pay heed to my warning: now make your retreat.
The singing of things, not words, is what's sweet.
Your words make things mute, so rigid and gray,
killing them, draining their beauty away.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translation by Daniel S. Shabasson )