LISTEN | How people from around the world have bravely protected our planet:
What On Earth27:08Why the climate movement needs more history nerds
Throughout history, human activity has often damaged the environment, pushing forests and wildlife closer to extinction.
But alongside these challenges are quieter, sometimes overlooked stories — people who have devoted their lives to protecting the natural world for those who come after us.
Here are three such stories from India, the United States and Canada.
The woman who died to save the trees
In 1730, in the village of Khejarli in the Jodhpur district of Rajasthan, India, the region’s king, Maharaja Abhay Singh, set out to build a new royal palace.
To supply the construction, Singh ordered the cutting of the area’s Khejri trees, which were essential to the desert landscape as they provided food, shade, shelter, and fodder for livestock, according to Amir Sohel, a doctoral candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, who researches carbon forestry and environmental history.
Despite the importance of these trees, royal soldiers and woodcutters moved in to carry out the order.
But a woman in the village, Amrita Devi, noticed what was happening and bravely ran out to confront the soldiers with the help of her two daughters, hoping to save the trees.
Ignored, the women embraced the trees, declaring: “Sar santey rukh rahe to bhi sasto jan” — a tree saved at the cost of a head is still worth it.
The soldiers killed the three women, an act that ignited wider resistance across nearby villages.
An under-construction memorial of Amrita Devi near Jodhpur in northwestern India. (Money Sharma/AFP)
“This is the first recorded environmental movement in India,” Sohel said. “And in fact, the world’s earliest women-led environment movement.”
An estimated 363 people died defending the trees before the king halted the operation and issued a ban on tree-cutting.
America’s first Black national parks superintendent
Marginalized groups have historically been overlooked for their contributions to the history of environmental conservation in North America.
Among those rarely told stories is that of Charles Young, who became the first Black superintendent of the U.S. national parks system, despite the racism he faced in his career, according to Alyssa Johnson, an outreach and programs co-ordinator at Community Science Institute, a New York-based non-profit organization that empowers communities to protect their local water resources.
Young was born into slavery in 1864 in Kentucky but escaped with his family as an infant to Ohio, where he later excelled academically and became one of the first Black students at his high school.
Charles Young was the first Black superintendent of the U.S. national parks system. (Bain News Service/Library of Congress)
After graduating with honours, he entered West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, in 1884 and then served in a cavalry unit in Nebraska, where he endured isolation and racial discrimination.
Despite this, he rose through the ranks and in 1903 was assigned to lead troops protecting what are now Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California.
“He marched his men out into this vast wilderness of redwoods and these ginormous trees to protect the land,” said Johnson.
Young and his troops protected the parks by keeping area livestock, such as sheep, from grazing within the parks’ boundaries, preventing illegal logging and safeguarding wildlife from poachers.
At the time, the parks were just 13 years old and still largely undeveloped, so his troops began building some of the first roads into the region, cutting routes through dense forest and rugged terrain.
Many of those early pathways still exist today, now incorporated into modern trail systems, and helping shape access to the parks for generations to come.
A woman stands amongst a grove of giant sequoia trees in Sequoia National Park. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)
The judge who listened
In the 1970s, interest in oil and gas development across the Canadian Arctic intensified, driven by the March 1968 discovery of one of North America’s largest oil fields at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, and a global oil crisis that underscored the risks of relying on foreign energy sources.
That momentum had taken concrete form, with a proposed pipeline set to cut through the environmentally sensitive Mackenzie River Delta, which stretches through the Yukon and Northwest Territories to Alberta.
As plans advanced, opposition grew, led by Indigenous peoples in the North, including the Dene, Métis, Inuvialuit, and non-Indigenous environmental groups warning of threats to a fragile and little-understood ecosystem.
In response, the federal government launched a public inquiry in March 1974, appointing Thomas Berger, who was a B.C. Supreme Court justice at the time, to lead the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry.
Justice Thomas Berger at Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry community hearing in Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories. (NWT Archives/Native Communications Society fonds – Native Press photograph collection/N-2018-010: 2909)
Though initially focused on technical details, Berger expanded its scope significantly, according to Tina Loo, a professor of environmental history at the University of British Columbia.
“He took that mandate where no mandate had gone before,” she said.
He travelled to all 35 northern communities, holding long-form hearings and allowing testimony in local languages.
In 1977, he recommended against any pipeline across Alaska and the northern Yukon due to ecological sensitivity, especially caribou calving grounds vital to Indigenous livelihoods.
He said a Mackenzie Valley route could proceed only after a 10-year moratorium to settle land claims and develop a parallel renewable resource economy.
Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry hearing at the Explorer Hotel in Yellowknife. (NWT Archives/Native Communications Society fonds – Native Press photograph collection/N-2018-010: 03878)
The project was ultimately cancelled in 2017 after Imperial Oil withdrew amid falling prices and cheaper alternatives.
“What’s so striking about that inquiry is just the time [he put in],” said Loo. “He would stay in a community for as long as they wanted to talk.”
