We have this last week said Goodbye to a truly remarkable woman, who did what was needed and became an inspiration to so many.We mark the passing of someone who truly lived what she believed.

In 1997 she started the Green Belt Movement, which engaged rural women in extensive tree planting for environmental restoration and better livelihoods, she faced down later government opposition and was involved in stormy and dangerous confrontations. In 2004 she became the first African woman, and the first environmentalist, to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.

The Green Belt Movement has gone on to plant over 45 million trees.

“A mad woman,” said Kenyan President Arap Moi in 1992,of Wangari Maathai  “a threat to the order and security of the country.” A few years before he had suggested in a public speech that she learn to be a proper woman in the African tradition and respect men and be quiet. Thanks goodness she never learned that lesson!

In  her 2009 book The Challenge for Africa  she urges Africans to free themselves of a sense of cultural inferiority and to recover respect for their own cultures, to the extent that they can be discerned after the long period of destruction and neglect. 

She points to the dangers of centralised power and urges systems of governance which allow the micro-nations within the larger states formed by the colonial powers to have voice in the policies of their country.

Specifically she writes about the deterioration of the environment on and around Mount Kenya and the Aberdare mountain ranges.  Deforestation, illegal logging, nonindigenous plantations, overcultivation – all the usual suspects – threaten water flows and rainfall patterns and lead to loss of enormous amounts of topsoil and many other deleterious flow-on effects.   If this continues it will make it impossible to achieve the MDGs in Kenya.  She points to the delayed development in neighbouring Ethiopia attributable to the reduction of forest cover from 40 percent of the country at the turn of the 20th century to only 3 percent today. 

Monoculture plantations of nonindigenous trees will not make up for the loss of forest. They are tree farms not forests. They destroy local biodiversity. They lack the capacity to receive and conserve rainwater. The Green Belt Movement has demonstrated, through its plantings in the degraded forests in the Aberdares, that in the tropics Nature has an extraordinary capacity to regenerate in comparatively short time frames. All the more distressing that the current Kenyan government is planning to reintroduce plantation planting stopped under the previous administration.

Climate change threatens Africa enormously in coming years. Saving the forests is an essential global element in fighting against that threat. Africans are not serious contributors to the emissions which feed global warming, but the forests Africa contains are recognised as a significant bulwark against warming. 

17 percent of the world’s forests are in Africa, with the highest deforestation rate in the world, at approximately half a percent annually. Maathai sees Africa doing its part in the global challenge by prioritizing the protection and rehabilitation of its forests. 

In 2005 Maathai was asked by the heads of state of the ten countries that have within their borders parts of the Congo Basin to serve as the goodwill ambassador for the Congo Basin Rainforest Ecosystem.  She has been active in her role and records substantial $100 million funding pledges to date from the UK and Norwegian governments.

“Bringing back what is essential so we can move forward,” is Maathai’s message.  It includes not only restoring forests, but also “speaking our languages, telling our stories, and not dismissing the lives of our ancestors.”