Wangari Maathai

Who was Wangari Maathai?

Wangari Maathai was a scientist who went back to the soil. Born in 1940 in the highlands around Nyeri in central Kenya, she became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, and then devoted her life to something very simple: planting trees, together with the women of her country. From this grew the Green Belt Movement, one of the largest tree-planting movements in the world, and in 2004 the Nobel Peace Prize.

What makes her so important is the connection she saw. For her, deforestation, eroded fields, the lack of firewood and clean water, and the poverty of rural women were not separate problems but one. Whoever planted a tree was doing something about all of them at once.

Her life

Maathai grew up in the countryside of central Kenya. She studied biology in the United States, at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas (1964) and at the University of Pittsburgh (1966), and in 1971 received her doctorate from the University of Nairobi, the first woman in East and Central Africa to do so. There she taught veterinary anatomy, became head of department in 1976 and associate professor in 1977, again as the first woman in the region in each role.

Through her involvement in the National Council of Women of Kenya, which she later chaired from 1981 to 1987, she listened to women from the countryside. As she recalled in her Nobel lecture, they named what they lacked: firewood, clean drinking water, a balanced diet, shelter and income. In 1976 she brought the idea of community tree planting into the council. In 1977 it became the Green Belt Movement.

Later she also went into politics. In 2002 she was elected to the Kenyan parliament for the Tetu constituency and became Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources. She died on 25 September 2011 in Nairobi.

The idea

The Green Belt Movement was built on a simple exchange. Women's groups set up their own nurseries, raised seedlings and planted them on farms, at schools and churches, and in strips of public land, the green belts. For every seedling that was planted and survived, the group received a small payment. As Maathai explained, the movement paid less for introduced species and more for indigenous and fruit trees. In this way, planting created income, knowledge and independence at the same time. The women no longer had to buy seedlings from the forestry service; they grew them themselves.

Planting led to more. Whoever cares for trees begins to ask who owns the land and who decides about it. Maathai combined the work in the nurseries with civic education, and the movement became a voice for the protection of public land. She defended Uhuru Park in the centre of Nairobi against a planned high-rise, and Karura Forest on the edge of the city against being parcelled out. Both remained public, and Karura is today a forest open to the people of Nairobi.

The Nobel Committee summed up her approach in a simple phrase: she thinks globally and acts locally. She herself saw the care of land, water and forests as work for peace, because where resources are scarce and contested, violence grows.

The work

Her main work is the Green Belt Movement. According to the Right Livelihood Foundation, about 600 nurseries with 2,000 to 3,000 women and around 2,000 green belts of about 1,000 seedlings each existed in the early 1980s; more than half a million schoolchildren were involved. In 1986 a Pan-African Green Belt Network was founded, which carried the approach to other countries.

She told her story in the memoir Unbowed (2006) and in other books, among them The Challenge for Africa (2009) and Replenishing the Earth (2010).

What became of it

How many trees were planted can only be stated with year and source, and the figures come from the movement's own reports. According to the Right Livelihood Foundation, the women reported more than 20 million trees by the end of 1993; the Goldman Environmental Prize named over 20 million trees and around 5,000 nurseries in Kenya; at the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 the Nobel Foundation spoke of over thirty million.

Her honours trace her path: the Right Livelihood Award in 1984 for converting the Kenyan ecological debate into mass action for reforestation, the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1991, and in 2004 the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace. She was the first African woman to receive it.

What we learn from Wangari Maathai

Terra Humana takes from Wangari Maathai the insight that a tree is never only a tree. Whoever plants one also changes the relationship between people and land.

We also take her attention to the nursery. A movement that raises its own seedlings from local seed becomes independent and learns what grows where. That she deliberately encouraged fruit trees and trees suited to farming points in the same direction as our own work: plants that feed people and serve the soil. And we take her steadfastness. Ecological restoration needs more than good soil; it needs people who stand by a place for decades. That, too, is part of what we call rehumanization.