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.

( Planting trees can be politically dangerous )



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Japanese-Canadian scientist, broadcaster and environmentalist. He is an ardent proponent for applying the concept of sustainability to the way that humans interact with the rest of nature.

“In the environmental movement, every time you lose a battle it's for good, but our victories always seem to be temporary and we keep fighting them over and over again.”



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Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist, essayist and activist.

"And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside." -- from The God of Small Things

"Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead." -- from War Talk


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Iraqi-British theoretical physicist and populariser of science.



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