Sousan Samadani: From YouTube Video to Soil Activist at 65

While watching YouTube videos, Sousan Samadani encountered a post warning that the world’s soil was degrading so rapidly it faced extinction.

The video, posted by the Save Soil movement, “was like a shock for me,” Samadani said. “I thought: ‘How is it possible that the soil that gives us food is dying?’”

In that moment, Samadani decided she was “going to be with this movement, fully, 100%.” Unesco projects that 90% of global soil could be degraded by 2050. Save Soil was launched by spiritual leader Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, who announced a 2022 awareness trip: a 19,000-mile motorbike ride through Europe, the Middle East and India.

Volunteers were already booked to accompany Vasudev, so Samadani, 65, of Utrecht, Netherlands, embarked on her own shadow journey. While Sadhguru visited 27 countries, Samadani reached all of those and more, including Nepal, Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana, assisting at campaign events.

Apart from three flights, she traveled by bus, train, and even hitchhiked from Turkey to Georgia. She stayed in hostels, with volunteers, or in “the cheapest hotel I could find,” she said.

Over three months, she sometimes went days without a proper meal, arriving at a station with her rucksack and heading directly to campaign.

Samadani had never been involved in activism. Why soil, and why now?

Growing up in Iran, Samadani said she always felt deep empathy for others. Hearing an ambulance made her stomach churn at the thought of someone suffering, and she would pick up banana skins from the ground to prevent slips.

She was born in Kermanshah, near the Iraq border. Her father ran a snack bar there, but when she was 19, her Bahá’í family moved to Shiraz to escape persecution.

“We were lucky that at least we could move to another city. We could start a new life,” Samadani said. Bahá’ís have faced persecution in Iran since the revolution, including property seizure, imprisonment, and execution.

Before the snack bar, her father had a wheat farm and a garden with fruit trees—“apricots, pomegranates, apples, plums, grapes—and there were sheep, cows, goats, turkeys and chickens. Everyone said it was an amazing, amazing garden,” she said.

The family left the property before she was born. She never saw it, even in photographs, but her parents’ descriptions left a vivid, fragrant memory.

In Shiraz, she played piano at a cultural centre, sometimes seven hours daily. When the teacher left, Samadani, then in her 20s, took over, teaching 40 children weekly.

She married, had two children, and in 1995, at age 35, left for the Netherlands “as a refugee.” Bahá’ís are barred from university in Iran. “I didn’t want my children to grow up under pressure,” she said.

In the Netherlands, she taught piano and rented a garden by the year. “I had flowers. I had potatoes, tomatoes, onions, different kinds of beans and fennel and carrot,” she said, adding 10 types of herbs, just like the basket her family kept on the dinner table in Shiraz.

Her newfound activism has been transformative. “It’s where my life of adventure started,” she said. She has skydived and cycled nearly 400 miles from Chennai to Coimbatore, India. Biking around Utrecht, she wears a Save Soil T-shirt and enjoys interactions with curious passersby.

But she has one country in mind. “My wish is to bring safe soil to Iran, because it needs it very, very badly,” she said.

She has not returned to Iran in 31 years. As a child, she prayed for “a world without war … I will go back when this regime is not there any more,” she said. “I am just waiting.”

And when she returns? “My dream is to have a garden like my parents’. I believe that I will make it.”

The Guardian asks readers: Has your life taken a new direction after age 60?

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