1 Wangari Maathai has always had an affinity for trees. As a child, she
learned from her grandmother that a large fig tree near her family home
in central Kenya was sacred and not to be disturbed. She gathered water
for her mother at springs protected by the roots of trees. In the mid-
1970s, Maathai, in an effort to meet the basic needs of rural women,
began to plant trees with them. Her non-governmental Green Belt
Movement has planted 30 million trees across Kenya, many of which still
stand. In 2004 her work was internationally recognized with the Nobel
Peace Prize.
2 “As trees grow, they give you hope and self-confidence,” Maathai said
recently. “You feel good, like you have transformed the landscape.” So
it should come as no surprise that within an hour of learning she had
won the peace prize for her contribution to sustainable development,
democracy, and peace, Maathai planted a tree. It was a nandi flame tree
native to her home region of Nyeri, Kenya, where Maathai was when she
heard the news. Never one to stand on ceremony, she knelt on the earth
and dug her hands into the red soil, warm from the sun, and settled
the tree into the ground. It was, she told the journalists and onlookers
gathered, “the best way to celebrate.”
3 I was with Maathai that day. Rubbing the dirt from her hands, she took
the occasion to turn her message to the world: “Honor this moment by
planting trees,” she said as the media jammed her cell phone. “I’m sure
millions of trees would be planted if every friend of the environment,
and especially of me, did.”
Putting the pieces together
4 It was in the mid-1970s that Maathai became aware of Kenya’s ecological
decline: watersheds drying up, streams disappearing, and the desert
English Language Arts
2 3
expanding south from the Sahara. On visits to Nyeri she found streams
she had known as a child gone—dried up. Vast forests had been cleared
for farms or plantations of fast-growing exotic trees that drained the
ecosystem of water and degraded the soil.
5 Maathai began making connections others hadn’t. “Listening to the
women talk about water, about energy, about nutrition, it all boiled down
to the environment,” she told me recently. “I came to understand the
linkage between environmental degradation and the felt needs of the
communities.”
6 She hit on the idea of using trees to replenish the soil, provide fuel
wood, protect watersheds and promote better nutrition (through growing
fruit trees). “If you understand and you are disturbed, then you are
moved to action,” she says. “That’s exactly what happened to me.”
7 Maathai set up a tree nursery in Karura Forest on the outskirts of
Nairobi, later shifting it to her backyard. But the idea did not catch fire.
In her book, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the
Experience, Maathai recounts bringing seedlings to the annual agricultural
show in Nairobi in 1975. A number of people expressed interest in tree
planting. Not one, though, followed up.
8 Disappointed, but not deterred, the National Council of Women of Kenya
urged her to pursue the idea and in 1977, the Green Belt Movement
was born. Planting trees seemed “reasonable, doable,” she says. But
government foresters initially resisted. They didn’t believe uneducated
rural women could plant and tend trees.
9 “People who are very educated find it very hard to be simple-minded,”
Maathai says, laughing. Women, too, didn’t think they could do it. But
Maathai showed them how, building on skills they already had.
10 The women, at first a few small groups, gathered seeds for trees in
forests. Then they planted them in whatever they had at hand, including
old tin cans or broken cups. . . . The women watered the seedlings and
gave them adequate sun. Then, when they were about a foot tall, they
planted them on private land (theirs or others’).
The trees grow—and branch out
11 When the tree was judged by Maathai or, in time, by her small field
staff, to have survived, women were paid. It was a nominal amount,
today less than 10 U.S. cents a tree. But in poor communities where
English Language Arts
4
unemployment was and still is rife, women’s options to earn money
are few. Income from tree planting is important; it provides women
a measure of independence and even power in households and
communities.
12 In 1981, the Green Belt Movement got its first significant funding when
the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) provided
“seed money” that transformed the effort from a few tree nurseries to
a large number with thousands of seedlings. The UNIFEM support also
“helped us mobilize thousands of women” whom Maathai calls “foresters
without diplomas.” In 1986, Maathai took her idea region-wide; with
funding from the UN Environment Program, the Green Belt Movement
launched the Pan African Green Belt Network. The Network offers training
and hands-on experience to grassroots environment and development
groups. A number of them, in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and
other African countries, have integrated the Green Belt Movement’s
approach.
13 Over the years, the Green Belt Movement has incorporated other
community activities into tree-planting efforts. Among these are
cultivation of more nutritious, indigenous foods; low-tech but effective
ways to harvest and store rainwater; training in entrepreneurship; and
providing information on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS prevention.
Anything but garden variety
14 Maathai, the first African woman and first environmentalist to be honored
with the peace prize, has always hewn to a singular path. The third child
of a sharecropper father and subsistence farmer mother, Maathai began
attending school at age seven. Her eldest brother, Nderitu, in school
himself, suggested it. Although it was unusual for rural girls in British-
ruled Kenya to study, her parents agreed.
15 Maathai excelled and found herself drawn to the sciences. After
graduating near the top of her class from . . . high school, she was
awarded a U.S. government scholarship designed to enable young
Kenyans to be post-independence leaders.
16 Maathai studied in Kansas and Pennsylvania, earning bachelor’s and
master’s degrees. In 1963, she watched Kenya gain independence on
television, and she returned home in 1966. Then in her early 20s,
Maathai joined the University of Nairobi as a researcher and then lecturer
in veterinary anatomy. What followed was a series of firsts. In 1971, she
became the first woman in east and central Africa to earn a Ph.D.; her
English Language Arts
4 5
doctorate is in biological sciences. A few years later she was appointed
the university’s first woman department chair. She got married and had
three children, now in their 30s. Her daughter, Wanjira, works with the
Green Belt Movement.
17 In the early 1990s, the Green Belt Movement launched a civic and
environmental education program. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech
in December, she said the purpose of the program was to help people
“make the connections between their own personal actions and the
problems they witness in their environment and society.” With this
knowledge they wake up—like looking in a new mirror—and can move
beyond fear or inertia to action.
18 Maathai and the Green Belt Movement led high-profile campaigns to save
Kenya’s forests and green spaces. In 1991, for instance, the movement
saved Nairobi’s Uhuru Park from an enormous high-rise to be built by
the ruling party. The dictatorship was still strong, and not amused.
For their boldness, Maathai and Green Belt colleagues were subjected
to stints in jail and harassment, including death threats. Many nights,
Maathai stayed in safe houses. . . .
19 And yet, she was not put off. “It is as clear as day. You cannot
protect the environment if you do not have democratic governance [or]
democratic space,” she says.
20 In 1992, partly as a result of Maathai’s activism, Kenya legalized
opposition political parties. In subsequent years, the regime, while still
corrupt and cantankerous, showed signs of cracking. After a series of
violent confrontations with Maathai and the Green Belt Movement over
Karura Forest in 1999, the regime abandoned its illegal development
plans. The forest stands today, vast and green, on the edge of Nairobi’s
throbbing streets.
Toward democracy and peace
21 Still, Maathai spent International Women’s Day in 2001 in jail. President
Moi, opening a women’s seminar that same month, asserted that
women’s “little minds” slowed their progress. But Maathai has had the
last laugh. She was elected to Parliament in 2002, then appointed deputy
minister of environment and natural resources. In many ways, her
world, and Kenya’s, has turned upside down. The day Maathai and other
members of the new government were inaugurated, Maathai recognized
her police escorts. They had once been her jailors.
English Language Arts
6
22 The night she was leaving for Oslo for the peace prize ceremonies,
Maathai hit Nairobi’s notorious rush hour traffic jam. The police were
called to clear the traffic so she could reach a send-off celebration in
time. Lillian Muchungi, a long-time Green Belt Movement staff member
who had been arrested with Maathai, was disbelieving: “Now they are
clearing the way for her. But how they used to fight us. Oh!”
23 Maathai told me she views the peace prize as recognition of a “long,
long struggle”—an honor unlike any she had thought to receive. Kenya’s
press deemed Maathai a model Kenyan who had made the country
immensely proud. Ordinary Kenyans, both women and men, cheered.
Many say Maathai is Kenya’s best hope of ending decades of stagnation,
corruption, and environmental decline (calls for her to be made
environment minister have not subsided).
24 “She’s an African iron core lady, a strong lady, brain-wise,” said Bernard
Mungai, a Nairobi driver, in a typical reaction to the Nobel news. “She’s
ready for everything. Women [like Maathai] will help Kenya catch up.”
One self-help columnist urged young Kenyans to plant trees; “You never
know,” she said, “where it might lead.”
Add two pieces of evidence from “The Green Belt Movement: The Story of Wangari Maathai” article that you plan to use in your letter to your local government in which you argue that an organization like the Green Belt Movement should be started in your area. (2 points)
Explain why you chose these quotes (2 points
1. Quote: "The Green Belt Movement has planted 30 million trees across Kenya, many of which still stand."
Reason: This evidence highlights the impact and success of the Green Belt Movement in addressing environmental issues through tree planting. It shows the tangible results that can be achieved by implementing similar initiatives in our local area.
2. Quote: "Income from tree planting is important; it provides women a measure of independence and even power in households and communities."
Reason: This quote emphasizes the social and economic benefits of tree planting initiatives, particularly for women. It showcases how programs like the Green Belt Movement can empower marginalized groups and contribute to community development and sustainability.