passionate people # 6: Wangari Maathai
Wangari Mathai Originally uploaded by cheryl_paris
From Worldchanging.org: Sustainability in a bright green world is about much more than environmentalism. It is about preserving our natural resources, yes. But it’s also about seeing those resources holistically, and understanding that a healthy environment is the foundation for human health and happiness, for international security, and for economic stability.
Few people embody this vision as passionately as Dr. Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan scholar, activist and politician who in 2004 became the first woman from Africa, and the first environmentalist, to join the ranks of Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
Maathai has made a life’s work of challenging tradition, questioning authority and exceeding expectations. At a time when few Kenyan women were educated, she won a scholarship to attend college in the United States, where she studied biological sciences as an undergraduate and later earned a masters degree from the University of Pittsburgh. After returning to Kenya and the University of Nairobi, she become became the first woman in her country to be awarded a Ph.D.
In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, which has mobilized women across Kenya to plant trees – and has paid them to do so. The Movement has since planted more than 30 million trees, and was recently depicted in the documentary Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai. Maathai has been a fearless activist and spokesperson for issues including women’s economic rights, poverty and education. She was elected to Kenya’s parliament by an overwhelming majority vote in December 2002, and served as Assistant Minister for Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife from 2003 until 2007.
Earlier this year, she released her third book, The Challenge for Africa, in which she puts forth realistic but ambitious strategies for Africans to end a decades-long cycle of corruption, poverty, ignorance, environmental degradation and other deep-rooted problems. The solutions, she says, must start with the African people themselves; they must embrace and exude an image of their positive potential rather than their victimhood, and that they must demand respect and justice beginning with their own governments.
Worldchanging had the honor of speaking with Dr. Maathai during her visit to Seattle in April.
Julia Levitt: In The Challenge for Africa, you argue that of all of the UN Millennium Development Goals for 2015, it’s the seventh — environmental sustainability — that is most important. How is a healthy environment the keystone for all of these economic and social goals?
Wangari Maathai: The way I look at it, we tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty and send children to school and provide health. But how are you going to do that? In Kenya, one of our biggest exports is coffee. Where do you grow coffee? You grow coffee in the land. To be able to grow coffee you need rain, you need special kinds of soils that are found on hillsides, and that means you have to protect that land from soil erosion so you don’t lose the soil. You also want to make sure that when the rains come you’re going to be able to hold that water and have it go into the ground so that the streams and the rivers keep flowing and the ground is relatively humid for these plants. For the rains and the rivers you need forests and you need to make sure these your forests are all protected, that there is no logging, that there is no charcoal burning and all the activities that destroy the forest. All this really needs to be done so that you can be able to grow good coffee, so that you can have an income, so that you can send your children to school, so that you can buy medicine, so that you can take them to hospitals, so that you can care for the women, especially mothers.
We see that the environment is something to exploit, because we see the environment in terms of minerals for example, or forests, or even raw materials that we produce on our land, or even land itself. We see it in terms of what we can exploit rather than the medium in which all of these activities have to take place. But you can’t reduce poverty in a vacuum. You are doing it in an environment.
Read the full interview here.
