Programme:
Earth Report investigates the impact that development has had on the environment and explores what is being done to protect our planet.
Contributor:
Wangari Muta Maathai, Kenyan environmental and political activist.
Broadcaster:
BBC World
Episode Summary:
Environmental campaigners make it their business to be a thorn-in-the-side of governments. So what makes an environmental activist, go into politics? In this edition of Earth Report we look at environmental activists who crossed the divide to become leading politicians. They've also won international recognition through awards from the UN and the Goldman Environmental Prize.
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Transcript:
Heaven is Green
"My name is Wangari Maathai. I was born in Nyeri some 60 years ago...as a child I grew up just seeing vegetation all around me, and seeing streams, clean, beautiful streams. In our language we don't have a word for desert, because we have never saw. Our land was always covered with forests and trees and vegetation."
"I love the trees, I love the colour. To me they represent life, and they represent hope. Once you've planted them they grow up, they grow taller than yourself, they speak to you, they give you shade, they give you a sense of satisfaction. I think it is the green colour. I tell people I think heaven is green."
Green Belt
Starting in 1977 with a small tree nursery in her back yard, Wangari Maathai launched Kenya's Green Belt Movement, a grassroots tree planting organisation that was run largely by women. The verdant Kenya of her childhood was becoming brown and dusty. Green Belt was her personal commitment to doing something about it, and in fact the problems facing Kenya's rural women provided inspiration for the idea.
"The issues around women actually made me conceive the idea that I could plant trees with women in the rural areas...mainly to provide them with energy, give them food - especially fruits - also building and fencing material and to protect the land from soil erosion...and generally to encourage Kenyans about the need to protect the environment."
20 Million Trees
Kenya's forest now covers just 2% of the land surface. There would have been even fewer trees without the Green Belt Movement, which has planted over 20 million since it was established.
Battle for Uhuru Park
Conserving Kenya's trees sometimes brought Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement into conflict with Kenya's ruling KANU party, led by President Daniel arap Moi.
"In 1989 we objected strongly and actively to suggestion that the ruling party KANU would build a skyscraper in Uhuru Park which would have meant losing one of the very few open spaces left in Nairobi. That was outrageous. We objected to it, we went to court, we lost the case but I must say that we won the war because the public was on our side, although it was at a time when the ruling party was very powerful, and the President had become a full time dictator we were able to win."
Wangari Maathai's determination to stand up to the Kenyan government, came at a cost. She and members of Green Belt suffered increasing government harrassment - despite the fact that Kenya was host country of the UN's Environment Programme.
"The government became very unhappy with us - we had to eventually physically fight to force ourselves in to the forest to plant trees and replace the ones that had been cut. Elements in the government did even hire rogues and vagabonds to actually attack us while we were in the forests. There were violent attacks, and some of us nearly lost our lives. It was not a joke."
Light at the End of the Tunnel
But international recognition provided a degree of protection. In 1991 Dr Maathai was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize.
"This recognition by the Goldman Environmental Prize was almost like a cover around us. It provided us with a protective shield, because the government recognised that somebody from very far in the USA recognised this work."
Con.. [see part 2]
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Wangari Muta Maathai speech at Rio Conferenceby knowyourrights20081,663 views
@erc814; I was just watching this video when I noticed your post. This was my first time ever knowing about or seeing this very interesting visionary. She will be missed by many.
123cilla1 2 months ago
R.I.P Wangari Maathai....one of the greatest female visionaries.
erc814 4 months ago