This week’s icon is a lady well known in her home country of India. For decades she has managed successfully to marry the ideals of political activism, environmentalism and sustainable development in ways that we in the West are far from achieving.

Beginning her illustrious career as a writer and researcher for the State of India’s Environment reports, Sunita Narain has since become the director of the Centre for Science and Environment and the Society for Environmental Communications, as well as the publisher of the fortnightly magazine ‘Down To Earth’.

In her years at the Centre, she has worked hard at analysing and studying the relationship between environment and development and at creating public consciousness about the need for sustainable development.

Her research interests are wide-ranging - from global democracy, with a special focus on climate change, to the need for local democracy, within which she has worked both on forest-related resource management and water-related issues.

The work she does in campaigning for a more sustainable way of life is practical and ‘real world’. Her group’s campaign against air pollution in the 1990s was largely credited with the decision to use compressed natural gas as fuel in Delhi's buses, taxis and three-wheeled “autorickshaws”. They have also brought rainwater-harvesting to the centre of the debate about how to cope with India's worsening water shortage—an achievement that won CSE last year's Stockholm water prize.

Rather than viewing humanity as some kind of virus on the earth, she looks at the human race and the earth as part of the same system, one that can prosper if society works at evolving a healthy relationship with their immediate and global environment. This ideal has allowed her to dedicate her life to improving the quality of life for millions of people in line with the development of sustainable ways of life – for her the 2 are inextricably intertwined

Sunita is also the author of many books, dating back to the publication of ‘Towards Green Villages’ in 1989, in which she advocated local participatory democracy as the key to sustainable development. In 1991 she co-authored the publication Global Warming in an Unequal World: A case of environmental colonialism.

The next year saw the publication of Towards a Green World: Should environmental management be built on legal conventions or human rights? Since then, she has worked on a number of articles on the policy interventions needed for eco-regeneration of India’s rural environment and poverty reduction.

More recently, Sunita has been in the headlines for her run campaigns against the abuse of power by large corporations in India. Though not fundamentally opposed to foreign investment or economic liberalization, she and her organisation do stress , “to strengthen oversight and the institutions that look after the public good”. In this regard, her target is as much the government of India as it is the PepsiCo's and Coca-Cola's of this world.

In a society where we feel the earth and its environmental problems have nothing to do with our daily lives, and where the idea of ‘going green’ is seen as an extra burden on our pockets, this is a real eye-opener.

Not only is her work an inspiration, it challenges us to question how exactly we define progress and prosperity? Are they merely about the building of a modern mass industrialized nation? Or are they about improving the lives of ordinary individuals in a way that respects the earth, allowing them to prosper in their own way?

Coming as she does from a newly industrialized power, where the poorest of people are rushing to attain the trinkets of modern western society in order to ‘keep up’ or for fear of ‘falling behind’, this is easy to understand. The only concern we have here is that the world may be moving too far in the other direction for this process to actually matter in the larger scheme of things. How much of an impact this will have over what percentage of the population globally, only time will tell.

Regardless, in the 25 years since Ms Narain went to work as a volunteer with the CSE it has had successes that must make it the envy of other activist groups, allying “the rigour of science to the passion of journalism”.

Narain remains an active participant, both nationally and internationally, in civil society. She serves on the boards of various organisations and on governmental committees and has spoken at many forums across the world on issues of her concern and expertise. In 2005, she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.

You can check out the Centre for Science and Environment here. I implore you to do so.

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