Wangari Maathai Discusses Her Life and Winning the Nobel Peace Prize
National Public Radio
December 22, 2004
Wangari Maathai in the Republic of Congo, February 2005. Photo: Marcus Agar.
Tony Cox, host: From NPR News, I’m Tony Cox. In 1977, Dr. Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots non-governmental organization based in her native Kenya. The mission of the GBM was simple and visionary. Kenya’s landscape had suffered terribly at the hands of unmoderated industry with large swaths of the country deforested. Also wanting to empower the women of Kenya, Dr. Maathai fused her passions for conservation and women’s rights and mobilized women’s groups across the country, encouraging them to plant trees. Thirty million trees later, Dr. Maathai’s Green Belt Movement has exploded into an engine for change in Africa and this year earned her the Nobel Prize for Peace. Dr. Maathai joins us now from New York. Welcome to the program.
Dr. Wangari Maathai (Founder, Green Belt Movement): Thank you very much.
Cox: Let me start by congratulating you. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is an accomplishment enough, but you are also the first environmentalist and the first African woman to earn it. That’s quite a precedent, isn’t it?
Dr. Maathai: It’s a wonderful recognition and we are very, very pleased with the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee to bring the environment to center stage globally.
Cox: How do you think that protecting the world’s natural resources encourages peace?
Dr. Maathai: Well, you know, the Nobel Peace Committee tries occasionally to help us expand the concept of security and the peace. And you remember in the past, they included the human rights aspect of peace equation, and now they have brought in the sustainable management of our resources and good governance as prerequisites for peace. When we look around the world and all the wars that are being fought, small or big, they’re usually fought over natural resources, either because they have been degraded or because we want to control them, but there are hardly any wars that are not fought over some form of natural resources. And so what the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee is trying to tell us is that we should focus on how we manage these resources, how we share these resources and how we govern ourselves and facilitate the management and the sharing for us to prevent conflict.
Cox: You’ve said before that you suffered through a hard beginning with your ideas about empowering women and using but not abusing the environment. Your steadfastness even came up in your divorce where you were described as too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control. Is that what it takes to get the job done?
Dr. Maathai: I think it was more or less the times in which we were living at that time. I had the privilege and the honor of being educated at a time when women were not receiving higher education. And I just think that this society was not ready for such a person, but today, it’s very different. Few women would have to go through what I was going at that time.
Cox: I recently spoke with Gertrude Mongella on this program. She, of course, is the president of the African Union’s new Pan-African Parliament, who told me that changing a culture is a slow process but she is optimistic that major cultural changes are coming all across Africa, especially for women. Do you agree with that?
Dr. Maathai: Absolutely. Culture is a very dynamic experience of humanity and no culture is static. We change with our times and definitely it is changing in Africa and it is giving more and more women opportunities to fulfill their potential.
Cox: The Nobel Committee also cited your political activism as you mentioned under the repressive regime of former President Moi. You were regularly imprisoned, even beaten. You led protests. What is the root of your civil disobedience and fight for rights. Did it come from your experiences and education in this country in part?
Dr. Maathai: Yeah, you know, I was here in the ‘60s. I had a very pleasant experience in Atchison, Kansas, in a small girl’s college called Mount St. Scholastica College. There is no doubt that my concept of rights, human rights, democracy and its space were deeply embedded in my subconscious, and so when I went back home, it was only natural that I would want to enjoy that democratic space and the respect for human rights and also to want the same for others.
Cox: In this country, environmental groups across the board have condemned President George W. Bush’s environmental policy. Now with low-income communities and communities of color often hardest hit by pollution and fewer regulatory safeguards, what do you think that we in the African-American community can learn from your success and use to bring about change in our own back yard?
Dr. Maathai: Well, one very important feature of the campaign that we have been leading is the fact that it is the bottom-up campaign. It’s a campaign that empowers people at the grassroots level, people who are normally ignored by the system, surpassed by the system and people who have no power, but the movement encourages them to do something about their environment. It encourages them to understand that no matter how low you are you can do something in your environment. You can remove the garbage. You can clean up the streams. You can repair your houses. You can do a lot of things. You can plant trees. You can plant flowers. There is a lot we can do with our hands and don’t need much resources and do not much need support from the government. Just mobilizing our physical energies, we can do a lot to improve the environment in which we live.
Cox: Let me bring our conversation to a close with this. You have been elected to the parliament where you now serve as assistant minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife. Now in this relatively new capacity and with the clout of a Nobel Prize in your pocket, what further change do you hope to see in Kenya?
Dr. Maathai: Well, I’m very pleased to be part of a government that I worked so hard to see in place, a more democratic government, a government that should be responding to the needs of the people and a government that has promised the people a better environment. I’m happy to sit in the parliament and to participate in the making of laws that will protect the environment. I also am in a position where I can appeal to my fellow members of parliament, to my government and indeed to my fellow leaders in Africa to improve the way we manage our resources, to improve the democratic space in our region and to work for peace so that we can give our youth and our people an opportunity to overcome poverty and allow them to develop, but we cannot do so until we have adequate numbers of our leaders in the region committed to the welfare of our people.
Cox: Dr. Wangari Maathai is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots non-governmental organization based in Kenya that focuses on environmental conservation, community development and capacity building. She was recently awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Maathai, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Dr. Maathai: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
Dr. Wangari Maathai (Founder, Green Belt Movement): Thank you very much.
Cox: Let me start by congratulating you. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is an accomplishment enough, but you are also the first environmentalist and the first African woman to earn it. That’s quite a precedent, isn’t it?
Dr. Maathai: It’s a wonderful recognition and we are very, very pleased with the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee to bring the environment to center stage globally.
Cox: How do you think that protecting the world’s natural resources encourages peace?
Dr. Maathai: Well, you know, the Nobel Peace Committee tries occasionally to help us expand the concept of security and the peace. And you remember in the past, they included the human rights aspect of peace equation, and now they have brought in the sustainable management of our resources and good governance as prerequisites for peace. When we look around the world and all the wars that are being fought, small or big, they’re usually fought over natural resources, either because they have been degraded or because we want to control them, but there are hardly any wars that are not fought over some form of natural resources. And so what the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee is trying to tell us is that we should focus on how we manage these resources, how we share these resources and how we govern ourselves and facilitate the management and the sharing for us to prevent conflict.
Cox: You’ve said before that you suffered through a hard beginning with your ideas about empowering women and using but not abusing the environment. Your steadfastness even came up in your divorce where you were described as too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control. Is that what it takes to get the job done?
Dr. Maathai: I think it was more or less the times in which we were living at that time. I had the privilege and the honor of being educated at a time when women were not receiving higher education. And I just think that this society was not ready for such a person, but today, it’s very different. Few women would have to go through what I was going at that time.
Cox: I recently spoke with Gertrude Mongella on this program. She, of course, is the president of the African Union’s new Pan-African Parliament, who told me that changing a culture is a slow process but she is optimistic that major cultural changes are coming all across Africa, especially for women. Do you agree with that?
Dr. Maathai: Absolutely. Culture is a very dynamic experience of humanity and no culture is static. We change with our times and definitely it is changing in Africa and it is giving more and more women opportunities to fulfill their potential.
Cox: The Nobel Committee also cited your political activism as you mentioned under the repressive regime of former President Moi. You were regularly imprisoned, even beaten. You led protests. What is the root of your civil disobedience and fight for rights. Did it come from your experiences and education in this country in part?
Dr. Maathai: Yeah, you know, I was here in the ‘60s. I had a very pleasant experience in Atchison, Kansas, in a small girl’s college called Mount St. Scholastica College. There is no doubt that my concept of rights, human rights, democracy and its space were deeply embedded in my subconscious, and so when I went back home, it was only natural that I would want to enjoy that democratic space and the respect for human rights and also to want the same for others.
Cox: In this country, environmental groups across the board have condemned President George W. Bush’s environmental policy. Now with low-income communities and communities of color often hardest hit by pollution and fewer regulatory safeguards, what do you think that we in the African-American community can learn from your success and use to bring about change in our own back yard?
Dr. Maathai: Well, one very important feature of the campaign that we have been leading is the fact that it is the bottom-up campaign. It’s a campaign that empowers people at the grassroots level, people who are normally ignored by the system, surpassed by the system and people who have no power, but the movement encourages them to do something about their environment. It encourages them to understand that no matter how low you are you can do something in your environment. You can remove the garbage. You can clean up the streams. You can repair your houses. You can do a lot of things. You can plant trees. You can plant flowers. There is a lot we can do with our hands and don’t need much resources and do not much need support from the government. Just mobilizing our physical energies, we can do a lot to improve the environment in which we live.
Cox: Let me bring our conversation to a close with this. You have been elected to the parliament where you now serve as assistant minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife. Now in this relatively new capacity and with the clout of a Nobel Prize in your pocket, what further change do you hope to see in Kenya?
Dr. Maathai: Well, I’m very pleased to be part of a government that I worked so hard to see in place, a more democratic government, a government that should be responding to the needs of the people and a government that has promised the people a better environment. I’m happy to sit in the parliament and to participate in the making of laws that will protect the environment. I also am in a position where I can appeal to my fellow members of parliament, to my government and indeed to my fellow leaders in Africa to improve the way we manage our resources, to improve the democratic space in our region and to work for peace so that we can give our youth and our people an opportunity to overcome poverty and allow them to develop, but we cannot do so until we have adequate numbers of our leaders in the region committed to the welfare of our people.
Cox: Dr. Wangari Maathai is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots non-governmental organization based in Kenya that focuses on environmental conservation, community development and capacity building. She was recently awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Maathai, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Dr. Maathai: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.