01 March 2009
Wangari Maathai: Trees of Peace
This article appears in the March 2009 issue of eJournal USA, Nonviolent Paths to Social Change (PDF, 783 KB).
Before Kenyan Wangari Maathai launched her community-based Green Belt Movement to plant trees and protect biodiversity — becoming the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize — few people equated environmental degradation with issues of human rights and democracy. No longer.
In announcing the award in 2004, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee said, “Peace on Earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment.”
Throughout her career, Maathai has shown that the movement to protect biodiversity and ensure sustainable development — in Kenya and around the world — is inextricably tied to the advance of democracy, human rights, and the alleviation of poverty. She has demonstrated how small communities and poor people can bring significant change in their lives through peaceful, nonviolent means.
“Through the Green Belt Movement, thousands of ordinary citizens were mobilized and empowered to take action and effect change,” Maathai said in her December 2004 Nobel address. “They learned to overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and moved to defend democratic rights.”
Maathai didn’t necessarily see these connections when she started her work. In the beginning, planting trees was simply a direct way of meeting the needs of rural women — the primary caretakers of their families — for firewood, extra income, prevention of erosion, clean drinking water, and better crop yields.
But there was another, equally important, and long-term result, according to Maathai. These women, she says, “are often the first to become aware of environmental damage as resources become scarce and incapable of sustaining their families.”
In her memoir, Unbowed, Maathai remembers a childhood landscape that was lush and fertile. She writes, “The seasons were so regular that you could almost predict that the long, monsoon rains would start falling in mid-March.”
As the decades passed, however, she witnessed the seasons becoming unpredictable and the land devastated through population growth and heedless exploitation by often-corrupt governments unresponsive to the needs of both poor people and the natural world.
More than 40 million tree plantings later, including the establishment of a Pan-African Green Belt Network, Maathai and her movement have also learned how environmental concerns are linked to broader issues of good governance and protection of human rights.
Maathai, who earned degrees from colleges in the United States and a doctorate from the University of Nairobi, found herself arrested, imprisoned, and beaten when her grassroots campaign took on endemic corruption in the government — especially over plans to build an office tower in the middle of Nairobi’s Uhuru Park.
But she prevailed. Maathai was elected to Kenya’s parliament in 2002, and she now serves as the assistant minister for environment, natural resources, and wildlife.
In her Nobel address, Maathai said that although the Green Belt Movement didn’t initially address political issues, “It soon became clear that responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space. Therefore, the tree became a symbol for the democratic struggle in Kenya. ... In time, the tree also became a symbol for peace and conflict resolution.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
