The son of a Mexican mother and a Greek father, Homero Aridjis was born in Contepec, Michoacán, Mexico, in 1940.  As a child, Aridjis used to walk to a hillside near his home, where he could hear the song of birds, see the Monarch butterflies in the trees, and experience the beauty the nature around him. Years later, as a diplomat and a writer, Aridjis returned to the place of his childhood and witnessed  hwo many trees had been cut down, and he could no longer hear the birds singing nor see the Monarch butterflies flying.

Concerned about the state of the environment, in 1985 Aridjis founded the Group of 100, an environmental coalition of influential artists and intellectuals (including Octavio Paz, Leonora Carrington, and Gabriel García Marquez), that fought to defend the environment and promote biodiversity in Mexico and elsewhere. The group lobbied for several causes, and achieved success in many of them, including the conservation of the forests that host the Monarch butterfly in the winter, the protection of the sea turtles from poachers, the improvement of air quality in Mexico City, and the preservation of lagoons in Baja California where gray whales goes to mate and bear their young. 

His achievements in support of the environment are known worldwide and have earned him man prizes, such as the Orion Society’s John Hay Award, the Natural Resources Defence Council’s Force for Nature Award, the Green Cross Millennium Prize for International Environmental Leadership (with his wife Betty Ferber), given by Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Global 500 award from the United Nations Environmental Program on behalf of Group of 100. Aridjis also won several awards as a writer, including the Golden Key of Smederevo prize for poetry, the Premio Letterario Camaiore Internazionale 2013, the Violani Landi University of Bologna poetry prize, and two Guggenheim Fellowships.

Known as the “poetic soul” of the Mexican environmentalism and as one of Mexico’s most important intellectuals, Aridjis has written more than 50 books of poetry and prose, many of which have been translated into 15 languages. In addition to writing about environmental issues, Aridjis also writes about love, death and sensuality, inspired by ancient Western and non-Western myths. Some of his poetry books are Mirándola dormir (1964, Watching Her Sleep), Los espacios azules (1969, Blue Spaces) El poeta niño (1971, The Child Poet), Quemar las naves (1975, To Burn the Boats), El ojo de la ballena: Poemas 1999-2001 (2001, The Eye of the Whale: Poems 1999-2001), Los poemas solares (2005, Solar Poems), among others.