1 Million Voices
Women in Ecology
Celebrating women’s ecological wisdom
Women across the world hold generational knowledge about growing, healing, conserving, and caring for land and community. Their practical, experience-based wisdom supports everyday survival and long-term stewardship. Yet it is rarely documented, recognised, or invited into decision-making spaces.
1 Million Voices of Women in Ecology is a participatory repository celebrating this everyday ecological wisdom, making it visible so it can guide how we learn, act, and imagine better futures.
This initiative has been co-created with Improving Lives Foundation.
In partnership with
Stories we are looking for
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Intergenerational wisdom
Wisdom that travels across time: a grandmother’s hacks, a mother’s memory of the fields, or a young girl’s inventive way of saving water.
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Local adaptations and innovations
Everyday experiments that show how women reimagine farming, resource use, and care for the land in changing climates.
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Artistic expressions
Songs, rituals, crafts, and dances that hold ecological knowledge in their rhythm and form.
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Human and more-than-human well-being
Stories that remind us of our kinship with the world — people, animals, plants, rivers, and winds alike.
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Women leaders
Voices of those who guide communities toward balance, nurture resilience, and model care as a way of leading.
Hear some of the voices of women in ecology
Urmila Raturi, a retired Hindi teacher, shares about how a punishment taught her to relook at her relationship with ecology.
Remya Sasindran shares her reflections on what a pet dog teaches about space, boundaries, and the power of giving as much as you take.
Experience these stories as creative activities
Using wisdom-based methodology, we have designed life lessons drawn from women's ecological wisdom into interactive modules for teaching and training purposes.
Each module transforms the lived experiences of women into meaningful and engaging learning experiences. Using play, arts, and creative writing, we turn intangible ecological wisdom into tangible skills that extend well beyond the classroom.
While the stories are rooted in ecology, the lessons are transferable to every area of life— how to observe, how to adapt, how to care, and how to belong to something larger than yourself. Whether you are a teacher, a facilitator, or a practitioner working with young people, these modules are designed to spark curiosity, build empathy, and open up new ways of seeing the world.
The Modules
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Students become Khojiis (seekers) on a mission to find, listen to, and document the ecological wisdom of five women in their lives. This four-lesson guide gives them the skills to have real conversations and the framework to turn what they hear into stories that travel.
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Through classroom activities, students explore what it means to belong to the natural world as a felt experience. Each lesson starts with doing and ends with a story from a woman whose life already knows what students are about to discover.
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This module explores resilience through the ecological wisdom of women who live and work closely with land and living systems. Drawing on lessons from nature, it invites students to see difficulty, change, and uncertainty as part of life's cycles rather than signs of failure. Through three lessons, participants reflect on discomfort, letting go, and renewal as pathways to growth.
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Through this module, students engage in classroom activities to learn deeply how communities develop wisdom through shared experiences, collective care, and living in close connection with their environment. Inspired by the everyday practices of women and communities who steward common resources, it encourages students to see wellbeing not as an individual pursuit, but as something created together. Through three lessons, participants examine the values of reciprocity, interdependence, and responsibility that help communities and ecosystems flourish.
Gaanth Baandh Lo — The knots that remember
The repository took the form of a participatory art installation at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference, held in Hamburg, Germany, from 29–30 June 2026.
The installation transformed women’s ecological wisdom into a collective, evolving artwork. Inspired by the Indian idiom “yeh baat gaanth baandh lo” (literally, “tie this thought into a knot”) and the tradition of knotting the end of a saree to hold something precious, we used pre-loved sarees to gather and share lessons shaped by women’s relationships with ecology, community, sustainability, resilience and care.
The installation became a living archive, inviting visitors to encounter the wisdom held in the fabric, reinterpret it, and add their own.
