When Patita Pavana Das was a sophomore at Indiana State University, he considered his life pretty typical: geoscience student by day, partaker in the school’s party culture by night. But as he learned more about the Earth’s billion-year history, Das, now 28, felt a nagging sense of dissatisfaction — a feeling that “there’s been a fundamental error” in how humans coexist with the natural world and each other.
That feeling became a “determination,” he said recently, “that I was going to seek out what would make me happy before I was pushed into a life path I didn’t feel was being defined by myself.”
