Sousan Samadani was watching videos on YouTube one day when she came across a post about how the world’s soil was degrading so rapidly that it was in danger of extinction.

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

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

A team of volunteers had already been booked to accompany Vasudev – so Samadani, 65, who lives in Utrecht in the Netherlands, decided to make her own shadow journey. While Sadhguru travelled to 27 countries, Samadani made it to all those and more, continuing on to Nepal, Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana, helping out at campaign events.

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

She travelled for three months, and sometimes went days without a proper meal because she would arrive at a station with her rucksack and rush off to campaign straight away.

Samadani had never even been involved with activism before. So why soil, and why now?

Ever since she was a child growing up in Iran, Samadani says, she has felt huge empathy for others – her stomach would churn at the idea of others suffering whenever she heard an ambulance, and she would pick up banana skins from the ground so people wouldn’t slip on them.

She was born in Kermanshah, near the border with Iraq. Her father had a snack bar there, but when she was 19, the family, who are Bahá’ís, 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 says. People of Bahá’í faith have been persecuted in Iran since the Iranian revolution, facing the seizure of property, imprisonment and even execution for their religious beliefs.

Before the snack bar, Samadani’s father had a farm on which he grew wheat, and a garden full of 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 says.

The family left that property before Samadani was born. She never saw it, not even in photographs, but her parents talked about it, and the picture of it, the scent of all those blossoms, has lingered clear and fragrant in her mind.

In Shiraz, she played piano (sometimes for seven hours a day) at a cultural centre. When the teacher moved away, Samadani, then in her 20s, took over her job, giving piano lessons to 40 children a week.

She married and had two children and, in 1995, at the age of 35, left with them for the Netherlands “as a refugee”. In Iran, Bahá’í people are not allowed to go to university. “I didn’t want my children to grow up under pressure,” she says.

In the Netherlands, she taught piano and tended a garden that she rented by the year. “I had flowers. I had potatoes, tomatoes, onions, different kinds of beans and fennel and carrot,” she says – and 10 types of herbs, just like the ones her family used to keep in a basket on the dinner table in Shiraz.

Samadani’s newfound love of campaigning has been transformative. “It’s where my life of adventure started,” she says. To raise awareness, she has skydived and cycled almost 400 miles from Chennai to Coimbatore in southern India. Biking around her home city of Utrecht, she wears her Save Soil T-shirt, and enjoys every interaction with curious passersby.

But there is one country she wants to take the campaign to. “My wish is to bring safe soil to Iran, because it needs it very, very badly,” Samadani says.

She has not been back to her home country in 31 years. As a child, she used to pray for “a world without war … I will go back when this regime is not there any more,” she says. “I am just waiting.”

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

Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?