Larger parties should check out private hire of the whole venue, which opens up all the unique spaces from top to bottom of the townhouse, as well as giving you a huge range of food options. Countries have fallen over themselves to plant the most and be linked with Maathai: Indonesia planted 79m in a day; Turkey says it has planted 500m, Mexico 250m, and India says that it will replant six million hectares of degraded forest. With more heavy rains starting on Tuesday, the plight of people in the country is expected to worsen, he said.

Central government and local authorities in the UK turn to Robin Murray, 67, when they need to reduce waste. When we were beaten up, it was because we were telling the government not to interfere with the forests," she says. Venter is not giving up his human genomics work, but says that he is now drawn to environmental problems by their urgency - and by the rapidity with which he thinks he can find solutions.

This area was devastated and people were fleeing, leaving their children, women and older people behind," Singh says. The following year, the village joined in to rebuild a second dam, and by 1996 Gopalpurans had recreated nine johads that between them held millions of litres of water. Venter has put his army of bugs to work on everything from renewable supplies of energy-rich gases such as methane, to advanced biofuels that don't threaten food production and could be used to fuel aeroplanes. I showed him pictures of surfing hippos, gorillas in clearings, elephants in the forest and gorillas and chimpanzees caressing their young. If I have learned one thing," she says, "it is that humans are only part of this ecosystem - when we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves, for on its survival depends our own.

He has also warned that 26% of the water in the seven biggest river systems is so polluted that it has "lost the capacity for basic ecological function".

The ground floor dining room is available to hire for 50 people exactly, and you can always escape to the basement jazz bar afterwards. Evidently stung by the criticism, in 1998 DiCaprio established the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which has since collaborated with the likes of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Oceana, the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Dian Fossey Foundation to raise awareness, particularly among children, of environmental issues. By starting with the simple step of digging a hole and planting a tree, we plant hope for ourselves and for future generations.

With his friends Kirat Singh, Sahir Doshi and Suraj Bishnoi, he set up Kids For Tigers which works in hundreds of schools. Yet it is the strict dictionary definition of the word that suits him best: a person of independent or unorthodox views.The Green Revolution was environmentally disastrous in India, he says: "In the 80s, the drastic erosion of the genetic diversity of rice and other crops was irreversible.

He shocked the more timid Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when he set an ambitious 60% CO2 reduction target by 2025 - and now he is championing renewables, energy from waste, heat and power systems, and ways Londoners can adapt their homes.Pan Yue, 47, deputy director of the state environmental protection administration, has become a hero for his willingness to stand up to corporations and local governments that jeopardise public health in the rush for economic growth. Lower water levels meant that the wells were not full, the forests and trees were dying off, and erosion was worsening. At 2am at the 2002 Earth Summit , he made one of the most impassioned speeches heard at a global meeting. Carlo Petrini, 58, is the only anti-McDonald's activist who has been welcomed to the offices of David Cameron, David Miliband, Prince Charles, Al Gore and Barack Obama.