Protect natural resources, Nobel winner says

Analysis:

This GR Press story did provide an overview of the comments by the Nobel Laureate, particularly around what the Green Belt Movement. However, the story did not address some of the structural injustices the women of Kenya faced, both in terms of gender injustice and the role that countries like the US play in over use of global resources. There were two people who attended the event that are quoted in the story. Do their comments provide any insight to readers on the content of the lecture? Why wasn’t anyone from the West Michigan Women’s Studies Council cited in the story?

Story:

There are roots in Wangari Maathai’s revolution.

“Anybody can dig a hole and plant a tree,” the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner told a capacity crowd Monday at Fountain Street Church.

That simple act, however, repeated millions of times in Maathai’s native Kenya, helped lift women out of oppression and the country out of a dictatorship.

Maathai, 66, is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, formed 30 years ago. Maathai, the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctoral degree, noticed fertile topsoil was running into the rivers because of deforestation.

Later, while preparing for a world conference on women’s issues, she connected the complaints of village women — no clean drinking water, poor soil for crops — with what she saw earlier. “You can get trapped in an environment that can’t sustain you,” she said.

“I don’t know why the image of a tree came to me,” she said. She told the women they had to begin. “They said, ‘We don’t know how to plant trees.’ I said, ‘Neither do I.’ “

They couldn’t grasp the instructions of the professional foresters. “We decided to use common sense, or women’s sense, and forget about the foresters.”

The Green Belt Movement paid women to plant trees. There now are 7,000 tree nurseries in a country that once was deforested to less than 2 percent of its land mass.

Maathai’s next life lesson was about limited resources. Farms, where the trees grew, conflicted with “pastoral communities,” with livestock needing to graze. Resources shrink when people begin to live as if they’re the only ones on the planet. “Very often, people don’t realize their problems are from their own actions,” she said. Sometimes, it is inactivity that hurts. “The national resources within your country are your resources. And the government is the custodian. So if your government is not protecting your resources, you fire them during the elections,” she said.

While that drew loud applause, similar comments landed Maathai in jail and led to her being beaten, years before. When Kenya held its first elections in 2002, however, she was elected to Kenya’s Parliament and appointed assistant minister for the environment.

“It’s amazing she was able to create such a strong movement with so little experience in the area,” said Kristen Canter, 21, a Kalamazoo native and a senior at Aquinas College who had never heard of Maathai. “Sustainability interests me. I studied in France, and the one thing I do now is take my own bags to Meijer.”

For Judy Buchman, who staffs the Wellhouse Homeless Shelter, Maathai was remarkable for connecting the women’s plight with the deforestation. “Sometimes, we don’t see what’s right there before us,” Buchman said.