Reading: #138: Tharaka Sriram (From Women’s Rights To Animal Rights)

“I didn’t go into [animal rights],” says Tharaka Sriram, founder of Ocean Education. “The topic found me and was a stage five clinger!…a little flame spark that got into me and created this whole different path.” In fact, Sriram, whose parents emigrated from Sri Lanka to Germany, grew up wanting to be an interpreter. “I speak six languages fluently. But when I had an internship as an interpreter in the office, I found it so boring. All you do is translate what other people do or say. There’s no place for your own thoughts…and I wanted to have my own opinion out there.” After Sriram escaped from her strict, conservative Tamil family, she went on to work for NGOs focused on women’s rights around the world. She worked on bringing micro-credit to women in India and domestic violence in Peru. In the small town of Tortugas, she discovered the connection between overfishing and domestic violence, and her interest in marine ecology was born. “The home of marine animals is being polluted and overfished,” she says. “There’s not enough space to be free and procreate. I want to give them a voice and make them important.”