Tag: Green Belt Movement

September 25, 2013 is the second anniversary of the death of environmental, peace, justice, and democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Wangari Muta Maathai.

Wangari Muta was born in 1940 in a round hut in rural tribal Kenya.  Wangari’s tribe considered the fig tree to be holy, and she was taught that one is never to cut a fig tree down or to use its branches for firewood.  Wangari spent many happy childhood hours in the shade of a fig tree that grew by a nearby stream.  Fig trees play an important role in the ecological system of the Rift Valley of Kenya.  Their roots penetrate the hard rock surface of the mountains to find underground water, thus opening channels where the water flows upward to fill streams and rivers.

As an adult Maathai learned that the fig tree she played under had been cut down by a settler with the result that the river had dried up.  This was happening all over Kenya on a massive scale to make room for cash crop plantations.  Rivers were silting up and widespread erosion threatened to turn the fertile Rift Valley into a desert. Crops were failing, animals were starving, there was no wood for cooking fires, and rural people were suffering.

Maathai  says that as she was thinking about this problem “It just came to me: ‘Why not plant trees?’ … This is how the Green Belt Movement began.”  Continue reading “WANGARI MUTA MAATHAI AND SACRED MOUNT KENYA by Carol P. Christ”