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Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Candace Beebe Pert (June 26, 1946 – September 12, 2013) was an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist. Pert published over 250 scientific articles on peptides and their receptors and the role of these neuro-peptides in the immune system. She held a number of patents for modified peptides in the treatment of psoriasis, Alzheimer's disease, chronic…

Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Daniel Quinn (October 11, 1935 – February 17, 2018) was an American author, cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as…

Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Frances Moore Lappé (born February 10, 1944) is an American researcher. She is the author of 20 books including the 2.5-million-copy selling 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet, which the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History describes as "one of the most influential political tracts of the times." She was awarded…

Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Adi Shankara, also known as Adi Shankaracharya, was a great Vedic scholar and teacher (acharya) who lived in the eighth century CE. In his writings, he synthesised the Advaita Vedanta teachings of his time and offered a harmonising reading of the Shastras with liberating knowledge of the self at its core. In…

Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Masanobu Fukuoka (2 February 1913 – 16 August 2008) 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…

Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Barbara Ellen Kingsolver (April 8, 1955) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments. In…

Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" an argument in favour of citizen disobedience against an unjust…

Dear Friends, Namaskaram! Wolfgang Sachs, (born 25 November 1946) is a researcher, writer and university teacher in the field of environment, development, and globalization. In 1992 he edited and co-authored the volume The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge in Development Studies, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Since 1993 Sachs has worked…