Growing Trees and Democracy: The Long View
Maathai’s determination helped plant hope for the future
Investor's Business Daily
November 7, 2006
Wangari Maathai at Aberdare National Forest in Kenya, October 2004. Photograph by Mia MacDonald.
For Wangari Maathai, success means getting your hands dirty—literally.
Maathai was born in the tiny village of Ihithe in the highlands of what was then British Kenya. She became one of the few women from her area permitted to go to school. She excelled and won a scholarship to attend college and graduate school in the U.S.
When she returned, she became active in environmental and women’s causes. In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement, which has planted 30 million trees in Kenya to prevent soil erosion and improve air quality. Her efforts to replace forests denuded by corrupt governments and fight for democracy won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She serves in Kenya’s Parliament, and is that country’s assistant minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife.
In a society where being a high school graduate put you among the elite, Maathai always made it a point to return home and head for the family garden.
“I was expected to read books. I was no longer in the category of people who dirtied their hands,” she said in a telephone interview last week with IBD. “But when I came home I would do things for my mother,” such as repairing her mother’s mud home or planting in and tending to the family garden.
Being helpful at home helped keep Maathai grounded in reality. “Sometimes you can be overwhelmed by your success and by what you have accumulated,” she said. “It is important to remember that all these things can be an illusion. What you do to improve the environment or improve the lives of people, these are things that are much more important. You can easily lose them if you forget who you are and where you came from.”
Maathai, 66, realized early on how much she could achieve by being single-minded in pursuit of her goal. Once, when she was in high school, her mother was just home from the hospital after having her appendix removed. So Wangari borrowed a burro to pick up some beans that were ripe on the vine.
“She was very weak and I was trying to be useful,” Maathai said. The load was a huge burden for Wangari and the burro. They slipped and slid on the way home, but, exhausted, finally made it. Maathai saw the experience as a breakthrough.
“I learned if I pushed myself it’s amazing how much I can do,” she said. “So often we have the capacity but we don’t push ourselves. If we did, we could accomplish so much more in our lives.”
Maathai was primed to accomplish a great deal. As she wrote in her newly published memoir, “Unbowed,” Maathai returned from the U.S. around the time of Kenyan independence “buoyed by the enthusiasm and optimism I sensed around me.” What she was unprepared for was the level of corruption.
She refused to be discouraged. Directing herself to be positive, she focused on what she could achieve rather than worry about what she couldn’t. “The best you can do is help people become more human and self-respecting,” she said.
To Maathai, the degradation of Kenya’s forests was glaringly painful, not only for the loss of beauty, but also for the environmental damage she knew was occurring. Determined to halt the damage, she started the Green Belt Movement to plant trees and fight to preserve the remaining forests.
It seemed simple and logical—trees would arrest erosion and improve air quality and soil for future crops. But planting trees was actually a political act. Government officials and their friends considered forests their private preserves and earned money—bribes—by allowing favored companies to clear-cut them.
Maathai was repeatedly arrested and beaten. Refusing to quit, she ramped up the pressure on officials through grass-roots measures. She rallied people to plant more trees, and publicly demanded multiparty elections and an end to corruption.
She realized she was plowing new ground. Such a project had never been tried in Kenya, and Maathai knew she’d make mistakes. When she made one, she studied it, vowed not to repeat it and moved on.
For example, a group of Maasai women planted seedlings far from their village. So Maathai arranged for burros so they could take sufficient water to the trees. The Maasai use burros to transfer household goods as they move from pasture to pasture. Ultimately, the tribal community decided the burros could be put to better use than for helping to water trees, and the trees died.
Maathai realized she had to be aware of local culture. “This helped me to understand that my approach to different communities must be different,” she said.
It also ensures longevity of a program, she’s discovered. “We try to get the people to feel as though they own the program and we are there simply to assist them,” she said. “The program has to fit their thinking and their values.”
To communicate clearly, Maathai insisted that meetings be conducted in local dialects. She’d realized that the culture’s politeness had people nodding and pretending to understand English when they didn’t.
Maathai also set a series of clear, simple goals. “I realized I could not give them too much information at the same time,” she said. “If you gave them step-by-step instructions in a logical way, they could follow.”
She also discovered that getting professionals involved complicated matters. Government foresters were educated in the official way trees should be planted and which tools had to be used.
“What amazed me was that they could see that these women were rural women and would not be able to get (and use) the same tools and same materials (the foresters) had,” Maathai said. “But they still went ahead and told these women they had to plant the trees the way they’d been taught in school. They did not have the imagination to adapt to the situation they found themselves in.”
One of Maathai’s biggest challenges was persuading people to take the long view. “I have to keep reminding them that the trees they are cutting today were not planted by them, but by those who came before. So they must plant the trees that will benefit communities in the future.”
Maathai was born in the tiny village of Ihithe in the highlands of what was then British Kenya. She became one of the few women from her area permitted to go to school. She excelled and won a scholarship to attend college and graduate school in the U.S.
When she returned, she became active in environmental and women’s causes. In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement, which has planted 30 million trees in Kenya to prevent soil erosion and improve air quality. Her efforts to replace forests denuded by corrupt governments and fight for democracy won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She serves in Kenya’s Parliament, and is that country’s assistant minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife.
In a society where being a high school graduate put you among the elite, Maathai always made it a point to return home and head for the family garden.
“I was expected to read books. I was no longer in the category of people who dirtied their hands,” she said in a telephone interview last week with IBD. “But when I came home I would do things for my mother,” such as repairing her mother’s mud home or planting in and tending to the family garden.
Being helpful at home helped keep Maathai grounded in reality. “Sometimes you can be overwhelmed by your success and by what you have accumulated,” she said. “It is important to remember that all these things can be an illusion. What you do to improve the environment or improve the lives of people, these are things that are much more important. You can easily lose them if you forget who you are and where you came from.”
Maathai, 66, realized early on how much she could achieve by being single-minded in pursuit of her goal. Once, when she was in high school, her mother was just home from the hospital after having her appendix removed. So Wangari borrowed a burro to pick up some beans that were ripe on the vine.
“She was very weak and I was trying to be useful,” Maathai said. The load was a huge burden for Wangari and the burro. They slipped and slid on the way home, but, exhausted, finally made it. Maathai saw the experience as a breakthrough.
“I learned if I pushed myself it’s amazing how much I can do,” she said. “So often we have the capacity but we don’t push ourselves. If we did, we could accomplish so much more in our lives.”
Maathai was primed to accomplish a great deal. As she wrote in her newly published memoir, “Unbowed,” Maathai returned from the U.S. around the time of Kenyan independence “buoyed by the enthusiasm and optimism I sensed around me.” What she was unprepared for was the level of corruption.
She refused to be discouraged. Directing herself to be positive, she focused on what she could achieve rather than worry about what she couldn’t. “The best you can do is help people become more human and self-respecting,” she said.
To Maathai, the degradation of Kenya’s forests was glaringly painful, not only for the loss of beauty, but also for the environmental damage she knew was occurring. Determined to halt the damage, she started the Green Belt Movement to plant trees and fight to preserve the remaining forests.
It seemed simple and logical—trees would arrest erosion and improve air quality and soil for future crops. But planting trees was actually a political act. Government officials and their friends considered forests their private preserves and earned money—bribes—by allowing favored companies to clear-cut them.
Maathai was repeatedly arrested and beaten. Refusing to quit, she ramped up the pressure on officials through grass-roots measures. She rallied people to plant more trees, and publicly demanded multiparty elections and an end to corruption.
She realized she was plowing new ground. Such a project had never been tried in Kenya, and Maathai knew she’d make mistakes. When she made one, she studied it, vowed not to repeat it and moved on.
For example, a group of Maasai women planted seedlings far from their village. So Maathai arranged for burros so they could take sufficient water to the trees. The Maasai use burros to transfer household goods as they move from pasture to pasture. Ultimately, the tribal community decided the burros could be put to better use than for helping to water trees, and the trees died.
Maathai realized she had to be aware of local culture. “This helped me to understand that my approach to different communities must be different,” she said.
It also ensures longevity of a program, she’s discovered. “We try to get the people to feel as though they own the program and we are there simply to assist them,” she said. “The program has to fit their thinking and their values.”
To communicate clearly, Maathai insisted that meetings be conducted in local dialects. She’d realized that the culture’s politeness had people nodding and pretending to understand English when they didn’t.
Maathai also set a series of clear, simple goals. “I realized I could not give them too much information at the same time,” she said. “If you gave them step-by-step instructions in a logical way, they could follow.”
She also discovered that getting professionals involved complicated matters. Government foresters were educated in the official way trees should be planted and which tools had to be used.
“What amazed me was that they could see that these women were rural women and would not be able to get (and use) the same tools and same materials (the foresters) had,” Maathai said. “But they still went ahead and told these women they had to plant the trees the way they’d been taught in school. They did not have the imagination to adapt to the situation they found themselves in.”
One of Maathai’s biggest challenges was persuading people to take the long view. “I have to keep reminding them that the trees they are cutting today were not planted by them, but by those who came before. So they must plant the trees that will benefit communities in the future.”