Tresa Rosaura Gaskin Coyle deHolf

Born to parents forcefully displaced by an act of Immenent Domain, Tresa's early years were filled with constant moves as her family struggled to find a permanent home. While on their travels she saw the great oasis belt, that band of green and glittering water that was so different from everything else she'd known. Despite her squeal of excitement and constant begging to go see it they never did stop to visit. But Tresa's interest never abated.
She learned that it was protected, but not the government acting in the interests of the public to preserve an important natural area. It was protected by corporations that conducted research. The medicine she used to control a genetic immune disorder was a product of that research. Later she discovered how much that medicine was costing her parents. It troubled her greatly.
Finally, as a young woman there was an opportunity to visit the oasis belt. As part of a tour of the pharmaceutical conglomerate she would be able to see the entire medicine development process. When the Rover came to a stop inside the Green Zone and the hatch opened, it was the first time she felt the dampness of a dewy morning. Scents of humus and plants flooded her with the pain of knowledge that only in this area was this delicate cradle. It was difficult for her to concentrate on the tour, but what she saw shook her.
Before the tour, in her mind's eye, she had envisioned teams of people walking through the canopy looking for plants, and harvesting part of them, leaving the rest to regrow. Humane sleep darts used to study animals up close before waking them up to go in their way. Instead there were large machines just mowing down everything in their path. The soil tilled, destoying all the life that lived below ground and monocultural planting which wiped out competing species. She kept her composure, and returned changed.
She spent the remainder of her schooling focusing on ecology and governmental process. Most of her classmates considered her obsessive, not sharing her desire to protect the oases. She began to lobby the government for policies and reform to prevent broadscale destruction in the oases. She had procured imagery and as able to prove the belt was shrinking.
Traction was hard to come by in the complacent senatorial halls so she created her own research group. Thier goal was to find a way to grow the medicinal plants in other places without destroying the oases. They found usable, but dry soils at the bases of mountains and valley bottoms. At first the greenhouses were small and the plants stunted and poor. Eventually they thrived and testing revealed that greenhouse grown medicinals had very little difference from the destructive monocropping of the pharmaceutical companies.
She went back to the government officials. By this time, stories of the greenhouse projects had been in the news, and Tresa had accumulated a following of "Greenies" as they became known. Carrying living examples of valuable medicinal plants and verified research they decended on the offices and chambers of every policy maker they could find. Despite these efforts, their clamour fell on deaf ears.
Defeated, but resolved to her purpose,Tresa and her Greenies returned to the greenhouses. At one of the researcher's suggestions they marketed some products of their own priced at cost plus a margin for business growth. As demand grew for their lower priced alternatives, the greenhouse they were nurturing the medicinal plant Tresa's medicine was based on was burned by arson.
Undaunted, they began rebuilding with a bigger greenhouse. When excavating some peculiar soil layers were found. Digging was halted and geologists friendly to the efforts were called in. Below the sandy soil top layer was a margin of sand a few inches thick and below that a black soil. It was found to be similar to what was found as a top layer in the oasis belt. The conclusion was the planet must have had a more verdant landscape in the past. Places in the bottoms of valleys and lower slopes of mountains may have been the last hold-outs of freely growing plants before the climate restricted them to the belt.
The greenhouse was constructed at that ancient layer of black soil. The researchers had no trouble growing the plants, and grow they did, becoming a jungle to themselves. Word began to spread, and public interest surged at the thought that the planet not only wasn't always desert but it might be possible to re-green it. The movement that created were the Regenerators which eventually shortened to Regenners. The politicians still had deaf ears.
Tresa's parents were killed in a crash on the highway when their autonomous car's AI went dark. On the way to identify the bodies, Tresa's own car's AI tried to take control while she had it on manual. It began to speed and the controls were wrenched from her hands. The doors locked and would not open. Finally she broke the seal on the window and lept from the car before it collided with a concrete pillar. Her lead researchers were in the car behind and had to swerve to avoid running her over as she laid in the road.
While they recovered from the shock, the radio in the second car came to life. An altered voice demanded their surrender when security came to get them. They ran off the road and into the desert. Some hours later, at the research complex there was argument whether to go into hiding or go public. There was also discussion about the technology they had and whether it would continue to be suborned. It was decided to bring in the orgainzers of the Regenners and make things as public as possible while changing out to lower tech devices.
Over the years more attempts were made on Tresa's and her leading people's lives. More arson destroyed more greenhouses and they were rebuilt. The Regenerators moved their facilities into remote areas and continued to expand. Tresa made one last attempt to change policy about the destruction in the oasis belt by pettitioning to be placed on ballots in the following election. She was poisoned by a mercernary in the employ of the same pharmaceutical company that made her medicine by swapping the medicine for an altered version.
Shortly after that became public knowledge, civil unrest grew from a simmer to a boiling point and the holocaust came. Her legacy lives on with The Regenerators still tucked away in far-flung places.