Wangari Maathai

Wangari Muta Maathai was born on April 1, 1940, in the village of Ihithe in central Kenya, the daughter of Kikuyu farmers in the highlands above the Rift Valley. She entered school at age eight — late, because her family had been displaced under British colonial labor policies — and rose through it quickly. She was selected for the 1960 Kennedy Airlift program that brought 300 East African students to the United States, earned her bachelor's degree at Mount St. Scholastica in Kansas, completed a master's at the University of Pittsburgh, and returned to Nairobi where she became, in 1971, the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate. Her field was veterinary anatomy.

She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, almost as an extension of conversations with rural women who had named what they were losing: firewood, clean water, soil, food security. The program was concrete. Rural women would plant indigenous trees on their own land or on communal land. The Movement paid them a small stipend for each tree that survived. The work simultaneously addressed deforestation, watershed collapse, malnutrition, and rural unemployment. More than 51 million trees have been planted to date.

The Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi understood, correctly, that this was political work. Maathai was beaten unconscious by police while protesting the construction of a 60-story office tower in Nairobi's Uhuru Park. She was clubbed, tear-gassed, jailed multiple times, and the subject of public attacks by Moi himself, who derided her in parliament for daring as a woman to challenge a government project. Her marriage ended in part because her then-husband said she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control."

She was elected to parliament in 2002 with 98% of the vote in her constituency. She served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources from 2003 to 2005. The Nobel Committee awarded her the Peace Prize in 2004 — the first African woman to receive it — "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace." The committee's framing was deliberate: Maathai had insisted, decades before it was a global consensus, that environmental protection, women's rights, and political accountability are a single project, not three separate causes.

She died of complications from ovarian cancer on September 25, 2011, in Nairobi. Her body was cremated according to her instructions — to spare a tree. The Green Belt Movement continues. Her framework of ecology-as-politics underpins climate justice organizing across the African continent and beyond.

She said: "When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and the seeds of hope."