by Ben Brooks
Someone once asked Ryan what he’d learned. Ryan said he’d learned that the world is like a great big puzzle, with everyone just trying to figure out where they fit in. “I figure my piece fits with clean water,” he said. “I just hope everyone else finds out where their puzzle pieces fit, too.”
STEVE IRWIN
(1962–2006)
As well as two sisters, Steve grew up surrounded by crocodiles, snakes, lizards, koalas, and a host of other animals. His parents ran a wildlife park. Luckily, Steve turned out to love animals as deeply as they did. He was given a pet python for his sixth birthday. By the time he was nine, Steve was out catching crocodiles with his dad.
When he grew up, Steve carried on his work trapping crocodiles that had wandered too close to towns and bringing them back to the park, where they could live undisturbed.
He was so keen on them that, instead of flying out to a peaceful beach on his honeymoon, he and his wife went into the wilderness instead. They spent their days searching for animals and filming their adventures. When a TV channel saw their videos, they asked Steve to make an entire series. They called it The Crocodile Hunter.
In the show, Steve and his wife introduced the Australian public to all kinds of strange and deadly creatures, from snakes to spiders, and birds to beetles.
“By crikey!” he would shout, staring into the jaws of a giant alligator. “Look at this beauty!”
Every year, he put one million dollars into a charity that bought areas of land in Australia and tried to return them to their natural state. His real passion was conservation. Even though his shows were entertaining, the point of them was to draw people’s attention to the animals.
He didn’t want people to think of certain animals as scary or dangerous. He wanted people to know they were beautiful creatures that we have a responsibility to look after, not just for their sake, but for ours, too.
Sadly, Steve died in 2006, while he was out shooting a documentary about stingrays.
His father said he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
JAMES EARL JONES
(BORN 1931)
Even though you might not know his name, you’d definitely recognize James Earl Jones’s voice. James has been the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, Mufasa in The Lion King, the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, as well as countless others. But he wasn’t always such a confident speaker.
From the age of five, James was raised by his grandparents. Life with them was so difficult that James developed a severe stutter and refused to speak because of it. For eight years, he remained almost completely silent. It wasn’t until an English teacher discovered his gift for poetry that James started speaking.
“It’s too good for you to have written,” the teacher told him, after reading one of his poems. “So please stand up and recite it from memory to prove that you did.”
James did it without stuttering. He’d found his voice again.
He went to college to study medicine, but soon realized that acting was where his heart was, so he switched courses. While he was studying, he also met his father for the first time in his life, and his father encouraged him to devote his attention to acting. They lived together, polishing theater floors for money, while James auditioned for parts in plays.
For a long time, he carried a spear in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of Henry V. His parts got bigger after that, appearing on the big screen in films such as Conan the Barbarian and Field of Dreams, as well as on the stage in productions like Hamlet and Fences. James has played a huge number of different characters.
He once said, “One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.” James is living proof that even when it feels impossible, we shouldn’t give up on finding our voices.
CHIEF JOSEPH
(1840–1904)
Chief Joseph’s real name was Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, which means “thunder rolling down the mountain” in English. He was the leader of a band of Native Americans who belonged to the Nez Perce tribe and lived in the Wallowa Valley.
When people arrived from across the ocean, carrying guns and swords, the Native Americans were forced off the land on which they’d lived peacefully for thousands of years.
When gold was found on Nez Perce land, they were told they would have to move to a reservation. Reservations were small areas of land where the Native Americans were sent so that the settlers could use their lands for themselves.
The government told the tribe that they had thirty days to leave or there would be a war.
Most of the other leaders were in favor of fighting. They didn’t want to leave behind their ancestors, their homes, and everything they’d ever known. Chief Joseph said he would rather say good-bye than fight.
So his band of Nez Perce began their long and dangerous ride north to Canada. They hoped to meet up with Chief Sitting Bull and his tribe, who’d fled in that direction after a vicious, bloody war.
For the three months they traveled, they were chased and attacked by the settlers. Through skill and intelligence, they managed to beat and escape their pursuers, even though the settlers’ weapons were better and their numbers were bigger.
After a five-day battle in freezing weather, just a few miles from the Canadian border, Chief Joseph was forced to surrender. He told his people, “I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
The Nez Perce were sent to live on reservations. Chief Joseph spent the rest of his life campaigning for the Native Americans to be allowed back to their homelands. He never let the world forget how his people had been treated.
WILLIAM KAMKWAMBA
(BORN 1987)
William was born in a small village in Malawi, where the houses are thatched and built from mud bricks, and tall golden grasses surround them like fences.
For William to go to school, his parents had to pay eighty dollars every year. They were farmers, like a lot of people in Malawi. They ate most of what they grew and sold whatever was left over to raise money. One year, there was a famine, so the Kamkwambas couldn’t earn any money and William couldn’t go to school.
Even though there was no one to teach him, William decided he could teach himself. He went to the nearest library and started reading.
Electronics interested him most. From books, he learned how to repair radios, and he set up his own business repairing the radios of the people in his village.
Then he found a book called Using Energy, which spoke about how wind turbines could create electricity by harnessing the power of the wind. Using trees, an old fan, and a broken bicycle, William managed to build his own wind turbine to power his house.
Everyone who saw it was amazed. When journalists heard William’s story, it became news all over the world, and he was invited to give talks and go on trips abroad. Different people offered to pay for William to start his education again, and money also came in for him to work on other projects around his village. Since the first windmill, he’s created more turbines, solar power, clean water, and soccer uniforms and equipment for his village team.
JOHN LENNON
(1940–1980)
In the 1960s, war was raging in Vietnam; the north and the south were locked in a fierce battle and each side had powerful allies in other countries. Millions of young Americans had signed up to fight. As they crawled through the dank and unfamiliar mud of the jungle, planes dropped bombs through the trees overhead.
Life was very different for John. He’d been in a band named the Beatles, one of the most famous bands ever to exist, and they’d just broken up. Free of the band, he could finally do what he wanted to do: try to move the world toward peace by putting a stop to the Vietnam War.
The first thing he did was marry his girlfriend, Yoko Ono. The second thing they did together was go on honeymoon. They didn’t go to a beautiful beach on an island; they went to a hotel in Amsterdam, got into bed, and stayed there for two weeks. Every
day, they invited journalists into their hotel room and they would talk to them about peace and love.
They wanted to let young people know that there are a lot of ways to protest the things that you don’t agree with. If it’s peaceful, protest can be anything: growing your hair, giving up your vacation, or sitting still until you’re heard.
John also fought for peace with his music, like his song “Give Peace a Chance.”
In 1969, when half a million people marched through the streets of Washington in protest, that is the song they sang.
Each protester held a sign showing the name of a dead American soldier or a village in Vietnam that had been destroyed. The fighting went on for another six years and over a million lives were lost.
Unfortunately, John’s life ended early when he was shot. But he wasn’t forgotten. Every year, on New Year’s Eve, his song “Imagine” is played in the center of New York City. “You may say I’m a dreamer,” he sings. “But I’m not the only one.”
CARL LINNAEUS
(1707–1778)
Bufo bufo means “toad.” We are Homo sapiens. And Argentinosaurus huinculensis is the name of a dinosaur that was as heavy as an airplane.
The reason scientists use this way of naming living things is all thanks to a man named Carl Linnaeus, who was born in Sweden in 1707.
Even when he was little, Carl was obsessed with plants. He wanted to know the names of them all and he spent every second of his time in the garden. People thought he was strange.
At school, he was more interested in nature than anything else, so his teacher suggested he study medicine, which he did.
One warm summer afternoon, his university professor found him wandering between flowers in the scientific garden. Curious, the professor decided to test him.
“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a shrub with pink leaves.
“Honeysuckle,” Carl told him straight away. “Native to Siberia and East Asia. Don’t eat the fruit; it’s poisonous, and you might die.”
The professor was amazed. He tried another—Carl knew it. And another—Carl knew that, too. The professor was so impressed that he gave Carl a place to live, a library to use, and made him a teacher at the university.
It was then that Carl worked hard to spread news of a new way of naming things: the binomial system. In the system, every living thing on Earth has a two-word name. Because of this system, scientists across the planet, speaking in different languages, would know when they were speaking about the same plant or creature. Carl named over twelve thousand species himself. He also made it a lot easier for us to make sense of the magnificent world of nature.
NELSON MANDELA
(1918–2013)
In the 1600s and 1700s, British and Dutch colonists arrived in South Africa and took power, resources, and land away from the native black South Africans. By 1948, white people had control of the government. They didn’t let black South Africans vote, interact with white people, or even move out of the areas in which they lived.
Nelson, whose name actually means “troublemaker” in one South African language, was born in a small village in 1918. He was appalled by the treatment of his people and began joining groups to fight against it. For doing so, he was kicked out of college.
Next, he joined a group called the African National Congress, and campaigned with them.
The government declared him a terrorist. They arrested him, found him guilty of treason, and threw him in jail. His enemies called for him to be executed. But the judge gave him a life sentence instead.
Nelson was so well known for his activism that, while he was in jail, the rest of the world began to look at how black people were being treated in South Africa. They put pressure on the white government to release him. Eventually, many years later, the white president Frederik de Klerk did.
“If you want to make peace with your enemy,” Nelson said, “you have to work with your enemy.”
And that is what he did. With Frederik, Nelson wrote new laws that would give South Africans of all colors the same rights.
By 1994, Nelson had gone from spending twenty-seven years in prison to being his country’s first democratically elected president. All that time, he’d never given up hope.
WILLIAM MOULTON MARSTON
(1893–1947)
In the 1940s, comic books and the superheroes who inhabited them became really popular. There were hundreds of them, like Batman and Superman and Flash and the Green Lantern.
But there weren’t any girls.
It made no sense.
Girls read comics, too, but they never got to see themselves in them. Not as superheroes, at least. All women in comic books seemed to do was get kidnapped and then get rescued by men.
One night, William Moulton Marston was explaining to his wife, Elizabeth, an idea he’d had for a new kind of superhero. This new superhero, he said, wouldn’t rely on a weapon or fighting, but on being clever and being kind.
“Fine,” his wife said. “Just make her a woman.”
And Wonder Woman was born.
William was a Harvard psychology professor who spent a lot of his time being fired from jobs for speaking up for women. During his studies, he’d become increasingly interested in women’s rights, and he based Wonder Woman’s character on early feminists and suffragettes—strong, powerful women who were capable of rescuing themselves.
In the comics, Wonder Woman comes from a lost world called Paradise Island, where women live peacefully without men. Then, one day, a man crash-lands on the island and Wonder Woman has to take him home. Back in his land, she finds herself caught up in a series of adventures, taking down evil gods and villains.
To help her, she has superhuman strength, bracelets that deflect bullets, and a lasso that can get the truth out of anyone.
She was a hit, with girls and boys, and new stories about her haven’t stopped being released since.
IQBAL MASIH
(1983–1995)
At the age of four, Iqbal started work at a carpet factory in Pakistan. When his mom got sick, she borrowed one hundred dollars from the owner of the factory to have an operation. She couldn’t pay the money back. Instead, she had to give Iqbal to the factory owner as a slave.
There, he was forced to work long hours in a tiny, hot space filled with noisy and dangerous equipment. He had to work relentlessly and was beaten if he ever slowed down.
When Iqbal was ten, he escaped. He ran to the police and explained everything. Instead of helping, the police took him back to the factory and claimed a reward. This time, Iqbal was chained to the carpet machine so he couldn’t get away.
One day, he spotted a poster for an organization called the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, who aimed to rescue people from captivity. He secretly contacted them. They told him that slavery had been ended and all slaves were supposed to have been released.
With the help of the BLLF, Iqbal and some of the other children from his factory were allowed to leave. But it wasn’t happening everywhere. Most factory owners were ignoring the new laws and keeping children trapped in their factories, chained to the clanking machines.
Iqbal made it his mission to set them free.
He snuck into factories and told the kids trapped there about their rights. He spoke at meetings and rallies, to businesses and factory owners, on behalf of the enslaved children. He was even flown around the world to talk about his plight and the plight of others like him.
In 1995, Iqbal was murdered for speaking out against the factory owners. By that time, he’d helped save the lives of over three thousand trapped children who felt as though they’d been forgotten.
DON McPHERSON
(BORN 1965)
Don McPherson was a famous American football player, but he never really felt comfortable playing sports. He didn’t like how competitive it was. He didn’t like how tough everyone acted. And he especially didn’t like how people treated each other.
A lot of things didn’t make sense to him
.
Why do we look up to people just because they can throw or kick a ball? Why are we so aggressive when we play? Is that a good way to act? And why do men insult each other by saying, “You throw like a girl?” Why would you talk about women being less able? What does that say about you?
Instead of playing football, Don now travels the country, talking to young people about masculinity, feminism, and sports. Especially in sports, he thinks that men often think and talk about women in negative ways, and that thinking and talking has consequences. Girls often stop playing sports at school because they’ve lost their confidence. Right now, all across the world, women are feeling unsafe because of how they’re treated by men.
Don believes that the way to end this isn’t just to treat women better ourselves, but to stand up and say something when we see people who aren’t.
“You can do this,” he says. “We can do this. Together, men and women can build a safer world.”
CHRISTIAN McPHILAMY
Children can lose their hair for many reasons. It can happen because they’re being treated for cancer, or have been burned, or can’t stop themselves from pulling it out. Not having hair can mean they get bullied and end up losing all their confidence.
Christian was six years old when he saw a commercial on TV explaining all that. He knew he wanted to help, and he decided that the best way to do it would be to grow his hair and then donate it, so it could be made into a wig for a child who needed it more than he did.
For two years, Christian stopped getting haircuts. His hair grew longer and longer and became a bright blonde mane that hung down to his waist.
Sometimes, classmates, coaches, or friends of his parents would tell him to cut it off and even offer him money to do it. They said he looked like a girl. Christian didn’t care and he wasn’t going to cut it. He made sure he took the time to explain to whoever was criticizing or making fun of him exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. When they found out that he was trying to help sick kids, a lot of people felt embarrassed and apologized.
