Tulsi Gowda never went to school, never learned to read or write, and spent decades working in a government nursery as a daily-wage labourer. Yet she became known as the “Encyclopedia of the Forest”, carrying generations of ecological knowledge in her memory and helping nurture thousands of saplings. Her story is not simply about planting trees. It is about learning deeply, serving quietly, and building a legacy that can outlive the person who created it.

There are some people whose journeys into climate action are sparked by conferences, reports, or defining moments of exposure. And then there are those, rarer still, for whom the calling arrives long before the language exists to describe it. Inas Retima belongs unmistakably to the latter. Growing up in Algeria, Inas noticed what others passed by without pause. Water left running when it should not have been. Waste discarded where it did not belong. Shifts in weather that fel