This is a story of a woman who planted trees. Sounds pretty quaint, doesn’t it? Well, truthfully, Professor Wangari Maathai’s story is about as far from quaint and as close to heroic as a human can get! Maathai comes from a small village in Kenya and is the founder of the Green Belt Movement. The Green Belt Movement is an organization that has multiple goals, but its original and core goal is to reforest Kenya and other parts of Africa through the efforts of women. This concept in itself is revolutionary because when Maathai began her work, she initially encountered a great number of male foresters who told her that working in forestry required more knowledge and skill than her poor, female workers had. Maathai simply did not believe them, and she chose to wholeheartedly entrust her followers with the planting and maintenance of seedlings.
Before we go on to learn about the other challenges that Maathai encountered as she built her movement, let’s first get a good understanding of why Maathai wanted to plant trees in the first place! The reason why Maathai chose trees is because they provide such a wide array of what are known as ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are benefits to a habitat, and trees provide many such benefits. Furthermore, trees provide benefits directly to humans, such as firewood and fruit.
But what are some of these benefits, you ask, and why are they important? Well, firstly, trees prevent soil erosion. Erosion is when soil is washed off of the land, and usually into waterways, by the rain or wind. This can be detrimental for several reasons. First of all, topsoil, or the top layer of soil, often contains the most organic material and therefore the highest nutrient content of any layer. When the topsoil is washed away, farmers are less successful at growing their crops and have less food to eat, a serious consequence in a poor country and region. Also, the runoff degrades the water quality of streams and rivers from which the people drink.
Trees are also able to draw up water that is buried deep in the earth. Some trees, such as African fig trees, are able to penetrate below layers of rock to draw up water, and this water springs from the base of the trees, forming streams large enough to provide drinking water to families and villages. Maathai recalls playing in one such stream as a child, and she later recounts going back to the site where the tree once stood and finding bare ground with no trace of the old stream that used to run through it. Gathering water, in traditional Kikuyu culture and in many other African cultures, is a woman’s work. When streams dry up due to deforestation, the women must walk even farther to find water and work even harder to haul the water back to their homes. The same goes for firewood. In African climates especially, this is no small feat.
The presence of trees also mitigates climate change. While human respiration, coal burning, fossil fuel burning, and many other activities release carbon into the atmosphere, trees do just the opposite. Trees take in carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, and they release the oxygen that is necessarily for almost all living things, including animals like humans, to survive. Maathai herself often refers to the Amazon and Congo Basin Forests as the two “lungs” of the earth. When we cut down our trees, she warns, we hack into the lungs that allow our planet and ourselves to breathe.
In Africa specifically, deforestation also leads to malnutrition. When women are not able to gather enough firewood to cook their traditional foods, they resort to more processed foods that have been developed in the Western world. These foods are “high in carbohydrates but relatively low in vitamins, proteins, and minerals,” notes Maathai. The direct result of this altered diet is malnutrition in African peoples, especially in children and elderly people. Not all malnutrition, therefore, is because of unavoidable poverty. Much malnutrition is because of diets that have been shaped by modern environmental problems and modern technology!
Maathai is a woman who cannot stand still and silent in the face of injustice. She strives, in everything she does, to make the world a better place. Her efforts to get the Green Belt Movement off the ground in the 1970s were staunchly opposed by her own country’s government for multiple, political reasons. She has been denied funding and support on many occasions. Not only that, but, unbelievable as it sounds, Maathai has actually been imprisoned and injured, and has willingly put her life on the line in support of trees, poor people, peace, and justice. She has worked determinedly in the face of corruption, sexism and ethnic prejudices. She sees the establishment of a true democracy in Kenya and the reforestation of Kenya as wholly intertwined issues.
Due to Maathai’s unending persistence, the Green Belt Movement has now employed tens of thousands of women and planted over 30 million trees. Maathai has run into hard times of blatant, violent attacks against the Movement, but nonetheless it has survived and thrived. In 2004, Dr. Maathai was shocked when she learned that she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize! She now holds a well-earned seat in Kenya’s Parliament and hopes to continue to pursue democratic change from her place within a system that has been used against her in the past. Wangari Maathai is a true peace lover and freedom fighter. She will not rest until she sees democracy and environmentalism rise to great heights in her country and around the world.
