For us to look at 2004 Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai today, it is difficult to imagine all she has been through on her journey to empower rural women.
I can still recall the first time I read of Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement. It was a 1978 issue of International Wildlife Magazine. It told of the most commonsense solution to deforestation I had ever heard of—the Green Belt Movement, initiated in Kenya by rural women to plant trees near their villages to provide abundant and easily accessible firewood. In fact, I still have a photograph from the article taped on the wall of my office. It is a picture of a human hand holding a clump of earth with a seedling growing out the top, just prior to planting. For me, it is the picture of hope.
The secret of the Green Belt Movement’s success wasn’t just that it was solution-oriented. (Although that’s important.) It wasn’t just that it was community-driven, rather than landing top-down from a UN program or the government. (That’s important, also.) The real secret to the program is that it empowers women. In rural subsistence farming communities everywhere, women make most of the daily decisions about resources. And in rural Africa, this often includes getting enough firewood to cook.
What began as a tree-planting scheme in 1977 grew, like its trees, into a pro-democracy and pro-environment movement. So effective, in fact, that during the reign of former Kenyan president, and de facto dictator, Daniel Arap Moi, Wangari Maathai was harassed, beaten, and jailed because of the political activism she inspired. Eventually democracy flourished, Moi relinquished power, and Wangari was elected to Parliament.
And the Green Belt Movement continues to grow. Today more than a hundred thousand volunteers are actively nurturing trees near their villages. More than thirty million trees have been hand-planted by volunteers in East Africa in the last thirty years. Their effectiveness can be measured in many ways, including better soil retention, cleaner rivers, and much better protection of the limited national forests and protected areas set aside for Kenyan wildlife.
Conservation and reforestation provide hope for the future. And hope for the future is among the basic rights of the women of East Africa, and people everywhere. At the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, we have a beautiful red maple tree in our central lawn that was planted by Wangari Maathai and a group of women in 2002 when she came to town to receive the zoo’s Wildlife Conservation Award. (Jane Goodall was the first recipient of the award in 1993.) I pass that tree every day, and it makes me smile to imagine what this garden and this world will be like when that tree is fully grown at the beginning of the twenty-second century.
