This is a review of the talk with Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathi and her effort in community environmental restoration and awareness in her country of Kenya and the whole of Africa itself. Her background as a biologist and founder of the Green Belt Movement as well as her election into Kenyan parliament have garnered her many accolades and prestige. Her initial foray into environmental conservation began with the first United Nations women’s conference in Mexico in 1975; at this summit, her and her fellow colleagues realized the environment was drastically changing and began a program led by women to plant tree’s. This became the Green Belt Movement. However, since then he has met with vigorous opposition from her government, because she began looking into environmental causes and asking questions about how government had been managing resources. Her fight has been devoted to make both government and citizens aware about the destruction and mismanagement of environment and resources. However, her restoration of the environment started from the top down with the need for a responsible government and “bottlenecks” in the development of Kenya. She spoke of how ill left mother countries had left their colonies, which beget a cycle of disrepair and elite uncommitted to the welfare of the people and the natural resources. Another topic that tied into mismanagement was the constant debt of the countries, the lack of fair trade and failures in accountability for the government. During the question portion of the talk, she spoke of the role of women in environmental reconstruction. Her point was that while men and women clearly had a role, women had a larger and perhaps more important role as they where closely tied to agriculture and the land. In the Green Belt Movement, women mostly plant the tree’s and use the money they earn to supplant the household. Maathi also promoted the idea of resource conservation and organizing scientific methods to conserve water in times of draught now more frequent due to depleting resources.
I found that a great deal of Wangari Maathi’s lecture dealt more with political aspects in terms of the pit falls she had to overcome for environmental restoration rather than the how her programs have been implemented. Concurrently, she spoke of the history of her country and the recurring theme of how indebt and her country has been because of previous government which has forced the country to sell its raw resources at extremely low prices to the same countries the owe money to thus creating a vicious cycle they can never get out of. In terms of women’s role in environment conservation, her comments reminded me of the lecture given by Dr. Sandra Harding whom spoke of feminist science and the different role that women take in environmental study and the different methodologies. Both Dr. Harding and Maathi view the role of women in science and more specifically environmental science as working closer to the land and the agriculture which I found to be a very interesting correlation. Overall, her lecture and the question and answer portion was geared to her general philosophy on how to better Kenya and all of Africa via not just environment but socio-political change. However, she successfully tied all the topics back to the inherent problem the there is indeed a need to reform the environments of Kenya as the majority f the land is becoming deserts and draughts much more frequent because of mismanagement relating to and begetting the severe poverty of the country. She did a rather concise and thorough job of explaining the environmental hardships facing her country and some of the possible resolutions.
Bryan Ali