(Host) As the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day approaches this coming
Sunday, filmmaker and commentator Lisa Merton is remembering the woman
who, until her death last year, reminded the world that there is
transformative power in planting a tree.
(Merton) I can’t think
of anyone who’s acted on behalf of the Earth and all her inhabitants
with more commitment, humility and courage than Wangari Muta Maathai.
She was the founder of the Green Belt Movement, and in 2004 became the
first environmentalist and the first African woman to win the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Wangari understood the land and our deep roots in
it in a way that few people do today. She spoke of herself as a "child
of the soil" and indeed she was. She grew up in a rural village in the
central highlands of Kenya, surrounded by land that is exceptionally
verdant and beautiful.
As a child Wangari lived with the natural
rhythms of the land, sowing, cultivating, harvesting. As she and her
family walked home from a day of cultivating on the land, watching the
stars appearing in the night sky, there were no combustion engines to
mar the song of the birds, the ease of the wind, the swift flow of the
water in the Gura River. Every action she took for the Earth was imbued
with the bodily memory of that peace, wholeness and community – hence
its power and integrity. Wangari was down to earth in a way that truly
embodies the meaning of that phrase. To me, she was a great force of
nature and love.
When Wangari returned to Kenya in 1966 after
studies in the US and became a professor at the University of Nairobi,
she reconnected with the rural women with whom she had grown up. They
told her that they were walking long distances to fetch firewood for
cooking, that their children were malnourished, and that the soil was
eroding from their land. She understood that something was seriously
wrong, and she felt the suffering of these women, who were completely
invisible to people in power.
Wangari suggested that they plant
trees; trees hold the soil, they provide nutritious fruit and firewood,
and they help to alter the microclimate as well. At a time when Kenya
was living under a dictatorship, these women soon discovered that
planting trees was a political act. As Wangari said, "When you start
working with the environment seriously, the whole arena comes: human
rights, women’s rights, environmental rights, children’s rights…"
Fear
never stopped Wangari from defending the truth. She put her life on the
line again and again for the Earth, for us, for all of life. As her
good friend, Vertestine Mbaya has said, "she got into trouble not just
because she was protesting but also because she was demonstrating the
potential power of a civil society."
On Earth Day, 2012, we
would do well to remember Wangari Muta Maathai and know that we have the
power to stand up for what we believe in and in her words, "do the
right thing, because it is the only right thing to do."