← Editor’s Travels

Breaking the status quo with Jeana De Zoysa

From the archiveThis story is based on a film first published on Dassa Vlogs on 5 August 2020, while The Dosage was on hold. Jeana’s roles, projects and views are as they were at the time of filming.

The last time Eashaan Dassanayaka and Jeana De Zoysa properly caught up, she was leaving for Malaysia and he for Australia. Five or six years on, in the middle of 2020, they sat down beside Bolgoda lake in Panadura to fill in the gaps.

Five or six years later

A lot had happened. Jeana had finished a bachelor’s degree in arts and social sciences, majoring in global studies. She’d travelled, thrown herself into environmental activism, and helped organise campaigns and protests. By the time of filming she was working as a freelance field guide in Yala, running social media for the wild-cat conservation group SCAR, and helping launch Earthly, an app where environmental groups post their projects and find volunteers.

The lockdown, she said, had been hard on everyone. “I’m constantly having to remind myself that I’ve been in a really lucky and privileged position.”

Eco-feminist, anarcho-primitivist

Her Instagram bio describes her as both, so Eashaan asked what that means. Eco-feminism, she explained, links the way women are held down under patriarchy with the way nature is exploited under the same systems. Anarcho-primitivism is harder to sell. Anarchy, she says, isn’t chaos and looting: “Anarchy very simply is the antithesis of hierarchy,” a world of self-governance without class systems. The primitivism part is the belief that humankind needs to return to simpler ways of living. “That’s a pretty unpopular belief,” she admits.

Rebellion, Sri Lankan style

Extinction Rebellion began in the UK in 2018 and spread fast. Jeana had wanted to start a Sri Lankan branch, went travelling, and came back four months later to find one already running. She joined, became its spokesperson and later a national coordinator. The group ran reforestation drives, beach clean-ups, education work and protests.

Eashaan pushed her on a common complaint: plenty of people call themselves activists on Instagram without doing much. She agreed that people should “walk the walk”, but said it starts with talking. “It’s about trying your best and acknowledging the choices that we have, and making the most conscious and compassionate choice.” She’s honest about it, too: “I’m still a hypocrite in a lot of ways.”

We have to really unlearn and re-evaluate how we live our lives.

Going vegan

Jeana went vegetarian four years before the film and spent the following year phasing out dairy and eggs. For her it’s a whole lifestyle: food, products, clothes. Her reason was simple. “My whole life I absolutely loved animals. I deemed myself a conservationist,” she said. “There was just a moment when I woke up and realised I can’t call myself these things while I still contribute to these industries.”

“What’s the difference between a dog and a pig and a chicken or a cow or a leopard?” she asks. “They’re all sentient. They all value their lives.” She also points to the environmental case, arguing that animal farming is a major driver of emissions, water use and deforestation, and makes a health case too.

Eashaan shares his own story: he first heard the word “vegan” working in a restaurant in Australia, when a customer asked for a vegan platter. Curious, he ended up at a gathering of environmental activists around a fire, listening to punk rock and asking how they managed it all.

This film was sponsored by The Vegan Kade, which brought in vegan products that are hard to find in Sri Lanka and sold them through its Instagram and Facebook pages.

Zero waste and the dress from Grandma

Beyond diet, Jeana talks about zero waste (“you can’t do it overnight”), minimalism and buying local. Instead of a plastic bottle of Coca-Cola, she suggests, drink straight from a coconut. She hadn’t bought new clothes in about three years: her dress was a hand-me-down, altered by her grandmother. Eashaan points out his own shirt is his dad’s, 20 years old. “See, you can look cool and not be spending your money and destroying the environment.”

The animals with no protection

The conversation turns to animal welfare. Jeana had protested a Colombo plan to round up stray dogs into shelters, which she says leaves weaker dogs to be attacked and spreads disease. Bigger than that, she says, Sri Lanka’s animal-protection law dates back more than a century, and animal cruelty can be punished with a fine of just 100 rupees. An Animal Welfare Bill was drafted in 2006 and, as of the film, still hadn’t passed.

Update, 2026Cabinet approved a new Animal Welfare Bill in June 2026 and it was gazetted in July, with fines of up to Rs 250,000 and jail terms for cruelty. It still has to pass Parliament. Explainer · The bill

Three small cats

At SCAR, Small Cat Advocacy & Research, Jeana ran the social media. The group works to raise the profile of Sri Lanka’s three small wild cats, the fishing cat, the jungle cat and the rusty-spotted cat, which get far less attention than the leopard. On safari, she says, people chase the big five and miss everything else: “the flowers and the small dung beetles and the insect life, the bird life.”

She’s careful not to blame villagers for the snares that kill leopards. Many are farmers protecting their crops or catching bushmeat to feed their families, and, she says, part of the demand comes from “privileged people from Colombo” ordering wild meat on safari.

Changing the status quo

Asked about the future, Jeana wanted to keep guiding, to “spark that inner conservationist” in visitors, and to go back to study, this time science, to help fill the gaps in research on Sri Lanka’s wildlife.

In the end, she says, our power is in how we choose to live. “That inspires the people around us, and the domino effect.” Her closing line is an old one, but she means it: be the change you want to see in the world.

Causes in the film

• SCAR, Small Cat Advocacy & Research, protecting Sri Lanka’s small wild cats
• Earthly, Sri Lanka’s free app for environmental volunteering
• The Vegan Kade, the film’s sponsor
• The Vegan Society’s guide to going vegan