Shreya Chaudhuri (2025)
Equi-Tea: মাটিৰ মুক্তি, মানুহৰ মুক্তি / “liberation of the land is liberation of her people”
The Equi-Tea Project puts my thesis research on Indigenous agroforestry into action by restoring ecological and economic justice within Assam’s tea industry. Through a three-pronged approach, I will expand my Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) archive into a farmer-accessible resource, build a collective for knowledge-sharing and agroforestry transition, and launch Chai for Change—a sustainable, farmer-led tea brand connecting Assam to global markets. Rooted in six generations of family tea farming and informed by fieldwork, this project uplifts Indigenous science, supports community sovereignty, and transforms exploitative supply chains into regenerative ones—restoring farmers’ agency as ecological stewards.
Biography
Shreya Chaudhuri is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where she studied Environmental Science and Geography with minors in Global Poverty & Practice and Data Science. She worked at the Student Environmental Resource Center (SERC) as a Climate Action Fellow, where she founded the Decolonial Environmental Network, created the course Decolonizing Environmentalism, and co-founded Tea for Thought—a campus tea café highlighting the colonial histories and global supply chains behind everyday products. Her senior honors thesis on colonial environmental history and Indigenous agroforestry within Assam’s tea industry was curated into a public exhibition at the South and Southeast Asian Library. She is the founder and executive director of Project Planet, a 501c(3) nonprofit for decolonial environmental education, and is now launching the Equi-Tea Project to put her research into practice—building a TEK archive, forming a farmer-led collective, and creating Chai for Change, a regenerative tea brand rooted in ecological justice and community sovereignty.
