By Amanda Spake
Wangari Maathai has lived a life of firsts. A native of Kenya, she was the first woman in her family to attend college, the first woman in East or Central Africa to earn a Ph.D., and the first African woman, and first environmentalist, to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps most importantly, Maathai was the first person to see that the enormously complex challenges of deforestation and global climate change could be addressed by small partnerships of poor, rural women, each taking one small step: planting a tree.
With the support of the National Council of Women of Kenya, Maathai began planting trees in 1977. A year later she founded the Green Belt Movement (GBM), a partnership of women's organizations that has become one of Africa's most successful sustainable development champions and an example to nations worldwide.
Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of annual global carbon emissions. Soil erosion and depletion, and food and drinking water shortages, may be traced to rapid deforestation in developing nations. Through the Green Belt Movement, thousands of acres of rich, indigenous African forest have been restored. Six thousand tree nurseries, operated by women, create jobs for more than one hundred thousand people. "The planting of trees is the planting of ideas," Maathai has said. "By starting with the simple act of planting a tree, we give hope to ourselves and to future generations."
Maathai set herself apart early by attending school at a time when few African girls were formally educated. She won a scholarship in 1960 to Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas, in the United States, earning a degree in biology in 1964. She received her Master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, in 1965. She returned to Kenya to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Nairobi, where she became a professor of veterinary anatomy. She became chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy in 1976, the first woman to attain either position.
As an officer in the National Council of Women in Kenya, Maathai saw rural women suffering from economic and environmental changes they did not know how to combat. Many had been encouraged by the government to switch from subsistence farming to growing cash crops, such as tea and coffee, for export. Large tracts of forest were cleared for commercial farming, producing a shortage of firewood, their key energy source. Agricultural runoff polluted the streams, so clean drinking water was disappearing, and soil depletion was making food impossible to grow.
"I came to understand the linkage between environmental degradation and the needs of communities," Maathai told Sierra Magazine in 2005. "'Why not plant trees?' I thought. ... Trees provide a source of fuel. They provide material for building and fencing, fruits, fodder, shade, and aesthetic beauty. Trees also offered women a small income." The GBM raised funds to pay a small amount for each seedling a woman successfully raised.
A partnership with the Norwegian Forestry Society in the mid-1980s gave Maathai a salary for her work, and allowed the organization to grow. The U.N.'s third global conference on women in Nairobi in 1985 drew attention to the GBM, and attracted funding from the U.N.'s Environmental Program. By late 2005, more than 15 African countries were involved in the Pan-African Green Belt Network. Today, the GBM also has affiliates in Europe and North America.
Maathai's focus and that of the Green Belt Movement, however, remains Africa. "Africa is the continent that will be hit hardest by climate change," she says. "African leaders and civil society must be involved in global decision making about how to address the climate crisis in ways that are both effective and equitable."
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
Source: U.S. Department of State
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