Can one woman save Africa?

"When does planting a tree become a revolutionary act – and unleash an army of gunmen who want to shoot you dead? The answer to this question lies in the unlikely story of Wangari Maathai.

She was born on the floor of a mud hut with no water or electricity in the middle of rural Kenya, in the place where human beings took their first steps. There was no money but there was at least lush green rainforest and cool, clear drinking water. But Maathai watched as the life-preserving landscape of her childhood was hacked down. The forests were felled, the soils dried up, and the rivers died, so a corrupt and distant clique could profit. She started a movement to begin to make the land green again – and in the process she went to prison, nearly died, toppled a dictator, transformed how African women saw themselves, and won a Nobel Prize.

Now Maathai is travelling the world with a warning. As she told the United Nations climate summit last Tuesday, it is not just her beloved rainforest that is threatened now, but all rainforests. 'As human beings, we are attacking our own life-support system,' she says. 'And if we carry on like this, we are digging our own grave.' "

Read her story, it is admirable, she went through hell.

A few excerpts:

"It was not only humans who were being cut down. Her forests began to be slashed by the British and replaced with vast commercial plantations growing tea for export. These plantations couldn't absorb and store water in the same way, so the groundwater levels fell to almost nothing, and the local streams dried up. After independence, Kenya's corrupt new ruling class continued the same policies, treating the forests as their private property to be pillaged."


More:
"I can't live without the green trees, and nor can you. I'm humbled by the understanding that they could get along without me though! They sustain us, not the other way round. We don't really know where we came from, where we are going, and what the purpose of all this is. But we can look at the trees and the animals and each other, and realise we are part of a web we can't really control."


One more excerpt:
"People said it would make no difference – that you can't make a dictator hear you, he's too strong," she says. "But I was in Japan a few years ago and I heard a story about a hummingbird. There's a huge fire in the forest and all the animals run out to escape. But the hummingbird stays, flying to and from a nearby river carrying water in its beak to put on the fire. The animals laugh and mock this little hummingbird. They say – the fire is so big, you can't do anything. But the hummingbird replies – I'm doing what I can. There is always something we can do. You can always carry a little water in your beak."




Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, she predicts catastrophe in Africa and for the world if we don't do something about it.
She says we have to deal with poverty and the environment problem at the same time:
"They have to be dealt with together. When you're poor, you will take whatever you can to stay alive today, which degrades the environment, and makes you ever poorer. It's a matter of breaking the cycle. Paying people to plant trees was the best idea I had to break the cycle and it is working."



I admire her, she is one of my heroines.
I want to end this post with a few of her words:
"And people took what they needed but didn't accumulate or destroy in the process. Those are values we need to rebuild in Africa."

The whole world needs to be rebuilt based on those values.



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