Green Heroes

Lives that bent toward the land. Foresters, farmers, organizers, scientists, the people who answered with their hands.

The profiles

Read their stories

Aldo Leopold

United States · 1887–1948

American forester who spent his career unlearning predator control and wrote the essay that gave conservation its moral foundation.

№ 04

Allan Savory

Zimbabwe · 1935–present

Zimbabwean ecologist who argued that grasslands need herds rather than rest, and became both an influential teacher and a contested figure.

№ 05

Bill Mollison

Australia · 1928–2016

Tasmanian bushman, scientist and teacher who turned a critique of industrial agriculture into a design system taught in over 140 countries.

№ 07

David Holmgren

Australia · 1955–present

The student who co-wrote Permaculture One at 23 and later distilled the system into twelve design principles used worldwide.

№ 09

Ernst Götsch

Brazil · 1948–present

Swiss farmer who bought 480 hectares of dead land in Bahia and turned it into forest that produces cocoa, bringing back springs that had dried decades earlier.

№ 17

Peter Wohlleben

Germany · 1964–present

German forester who abandoned industrial forestry for continuous cover management and then made forest ecology a global bestseller.

№ 21

Sepp Holzer

Austria · 1942–present

Austrian farmer who grew citrus at 1,500 metres in the Alps by rebuilding his mountainside into terraces, ponds and raised beds.

№ 23

Suzanne Simard

Canada · 1960–present

Canadian ecologist whose experiments showed trees trading carbon underground through fungal networks, overturning a century of forestry doctrine.

№ 01

Abdul Kareem

India · 1950–present

Indian conservationist who single-handedly grew a 32-acre forest on barren laterite land in Kerala over more than 30 years.

№ 02

Akira Miyawaki

Japan · 1928–2021

Japanese botanist who developed the Miyawaki method for creating dense native forests in record time, planting over 1,700 forests across 15 countries.

№ 06

Chico Mendes

Brazil · 1944–1988

Brazilian rubber tapper and union leader who organized nonviolent resistance to protect the Amazon rainforest from deforestation.

№ 08

David Milarch

United States · 1949–present

Michigan nurseryman who pioneered techniques for cloning the world's largest and oldest trees to preserve their genetics and combat climate change.

№ 10

Felix Finkbeiner

Germany · 1997–present

German activist who started Plant-for-the-Planet at age 9, building a youth movement that has planted billions of trees worldwide.

№ 11

Geoff Lawton

Australia · 1954–present

Australian permaculture educator who proved that even the harshest degraded landscapes can be rebuilt into productive food forests.

№ 12

Jadav Payeng

India · 1959–present

Indian environmental activist who single-handedly planted a 1,360-acre forest on a barren sandbar in Assam over four decades.

№ 13

John D. Liu

United States · 1953–present

American-Chinese filmmaker who documented the Loess Plateau restoration and founded Ecosystem Restoration Camps worldwide.

№ 14

Julia Butterfly Hill

United States · 1974–present

American environmentalist who lived 738 days in a 1,500-year-old redwood named Luna to save it from logging.

№ 15

Marina Silva

Brazil · 1958–present

Brazilian environmentalist and politician from Acre who fought alongside Chico Mendes and became Minister of the Environment.

№ 16

Japanese farmer and philosopher who developed 'do-nothing farming,' a radical method of agriculture that works with nature rather than against it, and authored the landmark book The One-Straw Revolution.

№ 18

Richard St. Barbe Baker

United Kingdom · 1889–1982

British forester who founded Men of the Trees in 1922, one of the world's first international conservation organizations.

№ 19

Saalumarada Thimmakka

India · 1910–present

Illiterate Karnataka environmentalist who planted 384 banyans along a 4 km road and an estimated 8,000 trees overall, earning the name Saalumarada, row of banyans.

№ 20