multibeautiful | Dr Wangari Maathai

This week’s theme is Female Nobel Laureates. Sadly, there are so few - and correspondingly even fewer of colour - that this really will only fill one week.

Dr Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her environmental work in Kenya. I learned of her death last week from

ajnabieh’s entry about her, from which I extract this quote from Wangari Maathai’s 2008 Blackwell Award acceptance speech. The Blackwell Award is given by the Hobart and William Smith Colleges in honour of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman in America to receive the Doctor of Medicine degree, to a woman “whose life exemplifies outstanding service to humanity.” The list of awardees can be viewed here.

Initially, tree planting was a very benign activity, and nobody bothered us because it was mostly a bunch of women getting together and teaching each other how to plant trees. But it became important also to teach them the other aspect of the linkage that I talked about: the linkage of governance. It's one thing to manage the resource, another to touch governance. Now who is in charge of resources, especially resources like forest, water, soil and land? It's usually the government that’s in charge. The people in power are usually in charge of these resources. And when you talk about managing those resources sustainably, accountably, transparently, sharing these resources equitably, you are stepping on the very big toes of those in power.

When we started talking about the importance of protecting forests and rivers, it meant that we would have to explain to the people in power how the resources were being poorly managed and how sometimes they are privatized by the people who are in charge, and how sometimes you get mismanagement, like illegal logging and cultivation in the forests. We started realizing that it is very important to hold our leaders accountable for the way they manage resources because they are not the owners of the resources; they are custodians. We put them in positions of authority to manage the resources for us because all of us cannot be managers. They are not supposed to privatize them, they are not supposed to own them and they are not supposed to exploit them to enrich themselves all at our expense.

When we started pointing out these problems in the government, that said that we were not doing what we were supposed to be doing. They told us to just plant trees and not worry about what happens to the forest, what happens to the waters. And of course we could not do that because that's part of the second leg, the second pillar, of what I talked about. Sustainable management, good governance. Good governance means you have to hold your leaders accountable, and you cannot hold your leaders accountable if you do not know how these resources are managed. That is when the Greenbelt movement started being seen as a dangerous organization.