Kenyan Nobel Prize winner shares insights at Harvard

Toussaint Losier

“I want to share with you a short story,” offered 2004 Noble Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai of Kenya near the end of her talk at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on Friday afternoon.

Titled, “Empowering Women and Children One Tree At a Time,” the address by this award-winning academic, activist and government official wove together a rich tapestry of wise counsel and political satire, humorous fables and personal struggles.

Thirty years ago, Dr. Maathai began working with women in rural Kenya to halt deforestation and alleviate poverty by planting trees to conserve the natural environment and provide greater access to income, fuel and other resources.

In 1977, she founded a broad-based, grassroots organization called the Green Belt Movement that has since helped restore forests, opened opportunities for rural communities, campaigned for non-violent, democratic change while planting over 30 million trees throughout her country.

In 2002, the GBM was part of a broad opposition “National Rainbow Coalition” that brought an end to twenty-four years of one party rule in Kenya. In that election, voters from Dr. Maathai’s district sent her to Parliament with 98 percent of the vote and the new government appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources.

Sponsored by the school’s Women and Public Policy Program, this event packed the forum with students, teachers, and political figures including former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen and Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Dr. Maathai’s entrance was met with cries from the audience and a standing ovation. Former ambassador Swanee Hunt introduced her as “an activist in office.”

Clothed in modern African dress, Dr. Maathai opened her talk by focusing on a simple point that has been central to her activism: an unjust distribution of resources creates poverty and fuels violent conflict.

Reminding the audience that across the world two billion people survive on less than a dollar a day, she cautioned that “it is impossible for us to go to live in the future together if we do not manage our resources, our finite resources, more sustainably and responsibly, and literally and deliberately work towards sharing them more equitably.

“And it is very important for us to create the environment in which that is possible. And that environment is an environment in where we have democratic space, choosing to call it democratic space, rather than democracy. Because that word can be translated in different ways in different parts of the world.

“But we need democratic space, a space where we are all respected, a space where our rights are respected. A space where even when the majority is in power, the minority can have their space, can have their dignity, can have respect. And that we can, in such an environment, work towards peace, towards preempting conflict.

“It doesn’t really pay for us to first cut each other’s neck, fight each other for years, and then at the end, honor people who come to try to help us fix each others. Wouldn’t it be much more wise for us, as a human family, to work towards peace? To listen to each other. To give space to each other. To acknowledge that none of us have a monopoly on wisdom and, therefore, preempt conflict. Now, I think the world have never been challenged this way before.”

Throughout her talk, Dr. Maathai referred to the Nobel Peace Prize as “recognition of a moment when the environment must surely become central” to government policies and everyday action.

Less of an acknowledgement of her hard work and achievements, she described it as encouragement for those involved in similar efforts and a signal to the rest of the world about the importance of Africa and the environment.

Peppering her talk with jokes that brought ripples of laughter from the audience, Dr. Maathai described the conversations that initially lead her to the tree-planting project as rural women detailed increasing difficulty finding clean water, making money for their families, finding for fire, and providing their children with a healthy food.

From these dialogues, reforestation emerged as a practical, long-term solution.

Rather than relying on experts to carry out this project, these women relied on “common sense, our woman sense” to first learn how to plant trees, and then teach others.

In defiance of laws banning even small meetings, Dr. Maathai and other women educated rural communities about the root causes of their problems and organized them to take responsibility for creating change.

In response, Dr. Maathai was repeatedly harassed, attacked by the police, and detained in prison, but refused to stop her activism.

This organizing often touched on the need for political change, described as similar to the problem of being stuck on a bus traveling in the wrong direction. Planting a tree was the first step to getting off the bus.

“And as we get out of that bus, we also get out of environmental mismanagement, the bus of bad governance,” Dr Maathai explained. “We get rid of the bus of people whose job it is to brew conflict and send young people to die for no other reason than they want to keep driving in their own direction, the wrong direction.”

With the recent reforms in Kenya as an example, Dr. Maathai offered that change is sweeping across the continent as many countries have replaced aging strong men with a democratically elected leadership that is on the right course.

In contrast, she warned that “it is very important that when people look at you, when they look at America, they don’t say, ‘are you sure Americans are traveling in the right direction?’ Because for most of us, what you do, we follow. We think you know where you are going.”

Dr. Maathai also challenged her audience to open to new ways of thinking about the environment and inequality.

“The environment is not a luxury issue, but when people are poor, they tend to think that poverty is more important. Poverty is both a symptom and a cause of environmental degradation. It puts you in a vicious cycle.”

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate ended her talk by honoring the memory of President Kennedy, whose efforts to provide expanded educational opportunities in newly independent African nations made it possible for Dr. Maathai to attend college in the U.S. in 1960.

She later became the first woman from East and Central Africa to receive a doctoral degree and the first woman in that region to chair a university department.