Tisna Nando, Indonesia

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The 2004 Asia tsunami destroyed villages, towns and lives. But in calamity there is sometimes opportunity—a wiping of the slate that, for better or worse, allows people to start over. In the aftermath of the disaster, Tisna Nando, a 35-year-old environmentalist from Indonesia's North Sulawesi province, saw that kind of clean-slate opportunity. As an education-and-awareness manager at Fauna & Flora International (FFI), a U.K.-based environmental NGO, Nando has worked for the past two years to help the people of devastated Aceh province create a better future for themselves by learning to live in greater harmony with their surroundings.

"It's difficult to talk about conservation when people are still trying to find a place to live," Nando says. "It was easier to speak about the environment when people were not so traumatized." After all, she and a handful of colleagues at FFI work in Calang, a district of Aceh where most of the homes and businesses were flattened by the tsunami, where half of all residents were killed, where survivors are still struggling to make enough money to put rice and fish on the table.

But Nando has slowly built trust among the locals. After the tsunami, the first order of business was damage control. So Nando started a program employing 300 people who cleaned up mangroves ripped out by the waves and replaced them with live plants in order to restore the shoreline's potential for shrimp and crab farming. An additional 25 hectares were planted along the coast to act as a natural barrier against future tsunamis. Now, with normalcy returning to the lives of the area's fisherman and farmers, Nando and her colleagues talk to residents one-on-one about the long-term benefits of preserving their environment.

Progress is often measured in small victories. For example, Nando says her group convinced a local official to refrain from opening a restaurant that featured dishes made from the area's wild birds. But they are also tackling greater challenges. Aceh's forests are the most ecologically diverse in Indonesia, but clearcutting has taken a heavy toll. FFI was able to convince the heads of six Acehnese villages that reckless logging was destroying their future.

In July, the village leaders signed an agreement banning the clearing of any more forests in their districts. Since then, "the water is much cleaner and not yellow like before," says Muhib Budin, a local leader. As part of the project, Budin received 12,000 rubber-tree saplings from FFI to plant as an income substitute for the village. Hashimi, an ex-logger who before the tsunami cut down more than 10 trees a month to satisfy demand for Aceh's precious seumantok wood, is also thinking long term. "If we replant the trees by the lake," he says, "maybe we could increase eco-tourism in Aceh." Those are hopeful words from an island where hope has been in short supply.