Who’s Who in Green: Wangari Maathai

Dr. Wangari Maathai is a Kenyan environmentalist and political activist who was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004. Maathai is internationally recognized for her dedication to democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. She founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental non-governmental organization, in 1977.

Born in 1940 in the Tetu division of the Nyeri District of Kenya, Maathai received both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in biology, and also studied veterinary medicine, earning the first Ph.D. awarded to an Eastern African woman.  In the 1970s Maathai was a professor of veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi and was active in the National Council of Women.

It was during her work with the National Council of Women that Maathai got the idea of planting trees in order to conserve the environment, prevent soil erosion and improve quality of life.  That led to the Green Belt Movement, which has assisted women in planting over 20 million trees on their farms, on schools and on church compounds.  Maathai’s Green Belt Movement spurred the creation of a Pan African Green Belt Network, spreading the idea of the tree-planting initiative.

Wangari Maathai ran for President of Kenya in 1997, but her party withdrew her candidacy a few days before the election without telling her. It was in 1998 that she gained worldwide recognition in her efforts to stop Kenya’s new president from tearing down hundreds of acres of forest to build luxury housing.  She has been arrested numerous times when taking part in protests, including once in 1999 when she suffered head injuries after being attacked while planting trees.

In December 2002, Maathai was elected to Kenya’s Parliament and she was named Deputy Minister of the Environment, Natural Wildlife and Resources in 2003. In 2004, she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her dedication to peace, democracy and sustainable development.

Maathai has spent much of her life championing the idea that protecting the environment will help ease poverty.  Here’s what she had to say in September at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, about her belief that if you destroy the environment, poverty cannot be eliminated:

I eventually found out that no matter what we do, after the global level, even at the national level, that it is extremely grassroots level, and the majority of the people that we have mentioned here, when we mention poverty, we are thinking about a large number of people at the grassroot level.

Now those people are mostly dependent on primary natural resources. We’re talking land, soil, water, forests. Yet we haven’t mentioned many of those issues except in terms of deficiency [...] But we need to think of how we can sustainably manage these primary resources that all of us depend on.

But the people at the grassroot are the ones that are most directly dependent on them. And even on issues of climate change. Even as we speak of what is going to happen, it’s already happening to a large number of people. They are experiencing lack of water. They are experiencing drying rivers. And most of all, they are worried because their forests are disappearing. And that is partly why I think that the environment is extremely important.

Wangari Maathai has done as much for environmentalism in Africa as Al Gore has done here in the United States, earning her an esteemed place among the most influential environmental figures of modern times. As much as she has already achieved, she will undoubtedly continue exemplary and inspirational work on behalf of the earth and its people.

Wangari Maathai’s Green Score: 90,389

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