7 Extreme Green Heroes

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Our Spinning Blue Marble

Beautiful, ain't she?

Home to Iguazu Falls and Emperor penguins, the Everglades and aurora borealis, the Cliffs of Moher and you, one of her seven billion inhabitants, she is Planet Earth, the third rock from the Sun, Terra, as our Latin ancestors used to call her.

As the only planet we're ever likely to call home, she deserves to be kept up—maintained, cared for, loved—right?

Yeah, yeah, we know—you recycle and take short showers and eat less meat. That's fine and dandy. It is. Truly.

But do you possess the moxie to go the extra eco-mile to preserve her natural sanctity? Would you sit in a tree for two plus years to prevent loggers from chainsawing it down? Would you plant an entire forest by hand? Would you traverse an ocean in a plastic boat to raise awareness about plasic pollution?

These eco-risk takers would—and did.

Click through to acquaint yourself with our 7 Extreme Green Heroes.

(Photo: Pawel Kopczywski/Reuters)

Julia Butterfly Hill

From December 10, 1997, to December 18, 1999, Julia Butterfly Hill lived in a tree 180 feet above the ground—on two six-by-six-foot platforms. Her 738-day treehug had one end goal: keeping alive Luna, a 1,500-year-old conifer, located in the Headwaters Forest of Humboldt County, California. More specifically, making sure Luna did not meet her demise at the end of a Pacific Lumber Company’s chainsaw. In the end, after months of arduous negotiation, Hill won. Luna, and any tree within a three-acre circle, was spared. Luna is doing "really well," wrote Hill in an email to TakePart two years ago. "Every spring, the tree is covered in new growth."

(Photo: Gerard Burkhart/Getty)

Colin Beavan

Could you live for an entire year—in New York City, no less—and produce a net zero impact on the planet? Journalist Colin Beavan did, accomplishing this extreme eco-feat in early 2008. For 12 months, Beavan and his wife, Michele Colin, went all in—they recycled everything, produced no trash except compost, used no paper products, watched no television, and ate only locally sourced food. Beavan’s successful green experiment was documented in the film No Impact Man: The Documentary.

(Photo: Lucas Jackson / Reuters)

David De Rothschild

To alert the masses on ocean pollution, specifically that stretch of water twice the size of Texas known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Australian adventurer David De Rothschild built a sailboat from 12,000 soda bottles and sailed it across the Pacific. His 60-foot catamaran, named Plastiki, arrived in Sydney, Australia, in July 2010 after departing from San Francisco some four months earlier.

(Photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

Newton Jibunoh

A soil engineer from Lagos, Nigeria, Newton Jibunoh is the founder of Fight Against Desert Encroachment, or FADE. He has driven across the world’s hottest and largest desert, the Sahara, three times, the last two in an attempt to increase awareness about desertification—the severe corrosion of land in arid climates due to the gradual disappearance of vegetation. Desertification’s main causes—overgrazing and over-siphoning of groundwater—can all be traced back to overpopulation. The long-term survival rates of many of the trees in reforestation programs have been low, according to Jibunoh, because well-intentioned community members and local leadership fail to take ownership of the saplings. “Instead of seeing this little tree becoming this mighty tree,” said Jibunoh, “you find that they have all died—so you have very little to show for it.” Against this backdrop, Jibunoh and FADE designed a “Plant and Own a Tree Today” campaign aimed at schoolchildren and rural women in the village of Kano State, Nigeria.

(Photo: Kelechi Amadi-Obi)

Jaday Payeng

For more than 30 years, Jaday Payeng has lived in the Indian provice of Assam on the outskirts of a 1360-acre forest comprising thousands of trees that Payeng single-handedly planted himself. What catapulted the-one man tree-planting machine into action? In 1978, when Payeng was 16 years old, he found some snakes that had been washed ashore on a sandbar because of flooding. The snakes eventually died because they had no tree cover. “I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms,” said Payeng, to the Times of India. When he asked the forest department for help with planting trees, they told him nothing would grow on the sandbar. He decided to prove them wrong. And has he ever.

(Photo: Times of India)

Bunker Roy

Born into privilege and educated at a “snobbish” university that produces Prime Ministers and ambassadors, Sanjit “Bunker” Roy was well on his way to a life of hobnobbing with India’s elite ruling class when he gave it all up in 1965 to become an unskilled laborer digging water wells in one of the country’s poorest villages. “I came into contact with the most extraordinary people,” said Roy to TakePart in November 2011. He dug for years before his deep-seated need to help the poor compelled him to launch Barefoot College in 1972. “It’s a college where only the dropouts and the copouts and the washouts are invited,” said Roy. “Anyone who has a degree and a qualification is disqualified from coming.” The solar-powered school trains the poorest of India’s poor to become “barefoot” water and solar engineers, architects, teachers, communicators, pathologists, midwives, IT workers, accountants, and marketing managers. “The approach of the Barefoot College is to take the sophisticated technology and bring it down to the common man who earns more than one dollar a day,” said Roy.

(Photo: Prakash Singh/Getty)

Katie Spotz

Propelled only by her two arms, Katie Spotz of Ohio entered the record books in January 2010 by solo-rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, from Senegal to Georgetown, Guyana. The then-22-year-old's 70-day, five-hour, 22-minute trek raised over $100,000 for the Blue Planet Network, a nonprofit funding safe drinking water projects for the billion people around the world in need.