In 2004, Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the founder of the “Green Belt Movement,” which focused on planting trees in Africa, and creating a sustainable lifestyle for the poor. In the YouTube mini-documentary, “Wangari Maathai & The Green Belt Movement,” Maathai talks about how it is important “to continue encouraging our governments and ourselves that the environment is not really an issue for tomorrow, it is an everyday issue.”
Photo courtesy of the Carolina Women’s Center
Maathai continues to talk about the ways in which she started her movement, and encouraged people to not only better themselves, but also the environment. She discusses how “the people at the top have power, [and] because they have power, they have control of resources, they have a lot of privileges, and they continue to increase these privileges from where they sit, and the public at the grassroot can continue to suffer.” She goes on to say how it is hard to change the people in power, at times, and so “instead of trickling down, we go to them [the poor] and say ‘maybe there should be a trickle up.”
Photo courtesy of The Goldman Environmental Prize
In our everyday lives, it is so incredibly easy to experience information overload from the extensive knowledge we are asked to remember; however, some people can be more than just a fact or a talking point to hold onto. They can become a model to follow as well. Maathai was able to do a lot with a grassroots activist initiative. She was even able to affect people in such a way that they would still plant trees, and even be able to turn a profit off of what they planted, long after Maathai had left them.
Maathai is far more than an important black activist, she also presents a model for the ways in which we should be activists ourselves. Anyone can start a grassroots movement for something we care about. That is what ‘grassroots’ implies after all, and money does not even need to be involved at times. Maathai found a way to change her environment for the better, and I think the environment is something we can all find a reason to care about.
Photo courtesy of biography.com