Wangari Maathai Recounts Her Remarkable Journey

Nobel Prize winner closes out 2009 Wooster Forum

WOOSTER, Ohio, Sept. 30 - Wangari Maathai recounted her remarkable personal journey, and the impact that journey has had on both the environment and political life in her native Kenya, for an attentive audience of several hundred last night in the final event of this year’s Wooster Forum.

Born in Nyeri, Kenya, Maathai was the first woman in East or Central Africa to earn a doctoral degree, from the University of Nairobi, where she taught veterinary anatomy. It was at the university that she began listening to women from the countryside complaining about the problems they faced, including poor harvests and lack of clean drinking water, firewood, and forage for their livestock.

“I wondered what had happened to the country where I grew up,” Maathai said.

What had happened was the displacement of native forests and vegetation to make way for cash crops like coffee and tea, leading to erosion, soil depletion, and the silting up of rivers and streams.

So in 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, which provided financial incentives to women’s groups to plant and nurture native species of trees on their farms and in school and church compounds. In the 32 years since its founding, the Green Belt Movement has been responsible for the planting of more than 40 million trees.

From the Green Belt Movement’s initial focus on planting trees, Maathai said, it was a natural progression to environmental and civic education on “how we govern ourselves and how that governance helps or hinders our care of the environment.”

“One way you empower people,” Maathai told the crowd, “is to first make them understand how they are creating some of the very problems they are complaining about” rather than blaming them all on outside forces, like the government. That way they can focus on solving the problems that are of their own making, at the same time that they work in the political arena to address those that truly are outside their direct control.

In Maathai’s case, that logic led to working to restore Kenya’s multi-party democracy, and ultimately to her election to parliament in 2003. In 2004, Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.”

Maathai ended by urging her listeners to do their part to protect the environment by heeding the simple exhortation to “reduce, reuse, recycle” and also to get involved in a larger initiative, such as the United Nations’ Billion Tree Campaign, which has been responsible for planting seven billion trees worldwide since 2006.