(photo: James Grimaldi)

Wangari Maathai came to town the first week in February to speak at the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Distinguished Speaker Series. This was part of UB’s 31st annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Event. Most people in Buffalo didn’t seem to make much of a big deal of her visit. But make no mistake, Dr. Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, is a very big deal. And we have to thank the UB MLK committee organizers, including Ruth Byrant and Mary Gresham, for hosting this thoughtful and earth-shaking provocateur.

The lecture took place at UB’s beautiful Center for the Arts on a bitterly cold evening. The weather was terrible and the windswept and treeless north campus of UB was no one’s friend. Perhaps because of this, attendance at the event was disappointing. But those who had the fortitude to endure the February obstacles were rewarded with extraordinarily wise words from an extraordinarily strong woman from the living heart and soul of Africa.

Dr. Maathai was born in a rural village in Kenya, and through persistence and brilliance was able to blaze a pathway that helped her become, among other things, the first woman from east and central Africa to obtain a doctorate degree. She was elected a member of the Kenyan Parliament in 2002 and in 2004 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel Prize was established as an international award in 1901 and recognizes achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The Peace Prize has been awarded annually to 94 people and 19 organizations. Past winners include Martin Luther King, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama and Lech Walesa.

Dr Maathai is a profoundly consequential human rights activist and environmental leader. She is the founder of the Pan African Greenbelt Movement, which focuses on economic empowerment and conservation. This movement is spreading worldwide.

Early in her life she recognized a need to improve women’s conditions and quality of life in Africa. She identified the poor conditions of the environment as a cause of fundamental social and economic problems, especially in rural African communities and villages. The Greenbelt Movement is a broad-based, grassroots program whose main focus is the planting of trees. The objective is to both conserve the environment and create economic opportunity for women. The movement has assisted African women in planting more than 30 million trees on farms, schools and church compounds.

“We decided that planting trees would benefit the environment, and we recruited and found money for women to do the job,” said Dr. Maathai.

“Once you replace an indigenous forest or ecosystem with a plantation or monoculture, or with nothing at all, you create problems. Soil erosion of thousands of tons is devastating great parts of Africa. When you clear-cut a forest, or remove this ecosystem, you reduce the capacity to retain soil.”

Soil helps to nurture our food system, clean and retain our water and sustain life. Environmental degradation has an economic impact, especially on local impacted and often impoverished communities. Dr. Maathai says that planting trees provides tremendous benefit: ”Trees stem erosion. They absorb carbon and we can use them in our efforts to fight climate change. Do you know that each person over a lifetime emits carbon that takes six mature trees to absorb? If we each plant a tree, we can plant six billion of them. Our goal is one billion worldwide.”

Her lifelong championing of empowerment, women’s rights, the environment and human rights has not been easy. Along the way she has been jailed, beaten and divorced by a husband who said in court that he “could not control her.”

“It really started for me,” said Dr. Maathai, “when in the late 1950s a young American senator named John F. Kennedy, working with others in this country including Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, looked at some of the developing nations in Africa and embarked upon a course of bringing young Africans to America for an education so that they could go back to their country and make a difference. We did!”

UB President John Simpson introduced the Distinguished Speakers program by saying that public research universities like UB “are designed to provide forums for the discussion of key social issues, problems and challenges on a global, regional, and local basis.” He characterized Dr. Maathai as an intellectual and activist and one of he world’s leading voices of conservation and human rights.

Echoing that theme, Dr. Mary Gresham, Dean of UB’s Graduate School of Education, introduced Dr. Maathai by reminding the audience of an American indigenous saying: “Treat the earth well—it was not give to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.”

Dr. Maathai opened her presentation by talking about the message of the Nobel Peace prize. “This has always been given to recognize those that promote peace and try to stop war,” she said. “Every award has been historic.”

Early on the prize was given to caregivers on battlefields, and to doctors and political leaders and diplomats and eventually to those who champion human rights.

“My award was historic. It was a recognition of conservation and the environment as it links to human rights and peace,” Dr. Maathai explained. “The message of the award is that in order to live in peace with each other, we need to manage limited resources on the planet more responsibly and accountably, and we have to share resources more equitably.

“In order to do this we need to govern ourselves with political systems that allow respect for human rights, law and diversity and the voice of minorities must be heard. If we can do this we are more likely to preempt the reasons why so many of us go to war on a local regional or global basis. There is hardly any war or conflict that does not reflect this. It is about management, access and control of resources on this planet. It is about oil, water and land. These are the resources that we go to war over. And as they become more scarce, unless we learn to manage our resources more responsibly, more equitably, there is no way that we will ever see peace on this planet. This is the message of this Nobel Peace Prize. This is the challenge of our time.”

Dr Maathai describes Africa as a continent rich in resources with a majority of its people living in poverty. She says that those resources have been exploited by economic interests that do not represent the interests of the people. She links economic exploitation with corrupt local and foreign governments. “When we first held meetings about planting trees, our government tried to stop us. A corrupt government is not interested in the welfare of the people. They misuse common resources such as forests, land and water. They work to enrich themselves. They do not want the public to know what they are doing, and so they try to work behind closed doors. They do not want the people to know that the people control those resources.

“Governments can get away with murder unless they are challenged.”

One example of exploitation that Dr. Maathai uses involves loans from developed countries, including the US and economic interests that the US represents, to developing nations. “These loans put us in perpetual debt,” she said. “Why would you loan us $10 and expect us to pay back $1,000? We are always paying back the interest and never get to the principle. This is a debt that is passed on to future generations. It is money that we cannot use for education, for healthcare and for our own enrichment and quality of life.”

She decries the exploitation of the African and developing world’s people and environment by “affluent societies.” “We live on a very small planet. If you destroy what you think of as a ‘distant corner,’ it will come back and destroy us all.”

Part of Dr. Maathai’s work has included the creation of an “anti-plastics” campaign.

”Plastic bags have replaced traditional baskets that we make,” she said. “This has local economic impact, because we are no longer making baskets, and contributes heavily to environmental degradation.” The plastic making process is both highly polluting, she says, “and it fills our forests and ecosystems and our landfills with materials that do not biodegrade. Why don’t we recycle more—reduce, reuse, recycle? Landfills, which are often intentionally located in poor communities, are ticking time bombs. How can we provide a future for our children unless we deal with this?”

So what can we do?

“Sometimes I feel completely overwhelmed,” said Dr. Maathai. “But when you understand that you can make a difference, that you can have a positive impact on future generations, you can never rest.

“Self-empowerment is critical. When we first started to plant trees, we were told by the professional foresters that we could not do it. That it would cost too much money. Foresters, like many professionals, are very ‘complicated’ people. Bless their hearts. But to us, this was a matter of life and death. And so our first revolutionary step was to teach ourselves how to do it. You plant a tree and it grows. You have to take care of it, water it, nurture it, but when it grows it looks just like the tree that the professional plants. And we grew trees and recruited more women. And now we have thousands of nurseries managed by women, for women and families, for communities, and for the earth.”

Dr. Maathai says that we also must realize that while it is always easy to blame someone else—say, the government—for our problems, it is important to know that we can make choices. She links this self-responsibility to empowerment. ”Understanding where the problems come from can be a revolutionary concept. We realized early on that many of the environmental problems were of our own making. We learned that there is a lot we can do for ourselves, which is very, very empowering. It is a transforming experience, as an individual.”

So, if you are creating a problem rather than practicing a solution, fix it yourself. If the government is creating a problem, managing the resources inappropriately, creating policies that you think may be harmful, get involved, vote, change the government.

Dr. Maathai had some advice for UB President John Simpson, who likes to advance the position that the university is a “green” university. “In Parliament I discovered that we print paper documents, and we always used only one side of the paper. I went to the president and said if we use two sides of the paper we can reduce paper use by half, and this will save trees, not to mention save money. He agreed. He sent a letter out to all government agencies saying that from now on we will all use two sides of the paper. I suggest, Dr. Simpson, that you do the same at the university.”

This writer, from the once great “City of Trees,” and a self-identified tree-hugger, would also like to impart a word of advice to Simpson: Out there on those windswept barren plains of the North Campus—plant some trees, John. Plant a lot of trees. That would be an important legacy long remembered.