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<div class="story-meta-left"> <div class="story-logo"> <a href="https://www.dailygood.org"> <img alt="DailyGood" src="https://www.karunanews.org/pics/90x90.jpg"> </a> </div> <div class="story-meta-info"> <div class="story-author">By <a href="/author?name=On%20Being">On Being</a></div> <div class="story-details"> <span class="story-date">May 28, 2019</span> <span class="story-read-time">13 min read</span> </div> <div class="story-source">Source: <a href="https://onbeing.org/programs/wangari-maathai-marching-with-trees/" target="_blank">onbeing.org</a></div> </div> </div>  <div class="story-meta-right">  <div class="utility-buttons"> <div class="dropdown"> <button class="utility-btn translate-btn dropdown-toggle py-1" type="button" id="translationDropdown" data-bs-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="false"> <i class="fa fa-language me-2" aria-hidden="true"></i>Cherokee </button> <ul class="dropdown-menu dropdown-menu-end translation-dropdown" aria-labelledby="translationDropdown" 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class="dark-link perm_post"> television, if there is conflict somewhere, we are very quick to say we need peacekeeping forces; and these peacekeeping forces are quite often soldiers from areas where there is peace. So suddenly you realize you may be in peace, but it is your son or your husband who now has to go and try to keep peace where peace has been threatened. So it becomes really an important issue for all of us, whether we are rich or we are poor.</p> <p>Recently, I was in Japan. I was very lucky because I came across a word called mottainai, which is a Japanese Buddhist concept that is entrenched in the Japanese culture, which encourages people not to waste resources. And this was especially true, they told me …</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>It’s a spiritual concept.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Yeah, it’s a spiritual concept. And in fact, this aspect was brought out to me by a monk. I think his name is Monk Mori from Kyoto temple. We went in, and he had heard me use that word publicly, and he said, I’m so happy you’re using that word mottainai, because it is a word that Japanese don’t use anymore because they feel embarrassed to say don’t waste resources, because they have so much — or receive resources with gratitude, receive what you get from the Mother Earth with gratitude or from nature with gratitude. We usually don’t think about that. We don’t usually thank nature for giving us what she does.</p> <p>And he reminded me of the Christian concept of let us be custodians of the environment, of the resources, rather than of …</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>“Stewardship” is a good Christian word.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Yeah, the stewardship. I’m very happy that theologians now are really more and more encouraging us to think of ourselves as custodians, stewards, rather than domineering masters, you know. So this, coming from a country like Japan, is very, very …</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>It’s very interesting.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>It’s very interesting, and it’s very, very good. And I was very happy that, because it was their word, when I started using it, they said, “Oh, this is so wonderful.” I said, “Yeah.” And especially, because in the industrialized countries like America you have the technology, you have the capital, you have the skills, you can actually use a lot of resources that, instead of wasting them, you can recycle them using the technology, and you can therefore help to save how much of the resources that are being used in the world. But see, if you become wasteful, if you are not grateful, if you don’t recycle — because why should you recycle when you can buy more — you must always remember: But there are billions out there who don’t have enough even to survive, let alone to decide whether they should reduce or reuse.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>It’s hard for people to — for those billions to seem real, to influence little tiny decisions that are made in the course of daily life about whether to recycle something.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Precisely. They look distant because quite often we don’t see their faces except when they are dying and their faces are brought to the television in our living rooms. And then we are very quick to call our representatives and tell them, “Do something about these people who are dying in this corner of the world.” But it’s happening all the time.</p> <p>[<em>music: “Cinquante Six” by Ali Farka Touré</em>]</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>I’m Krista Tippett, and this is <em>On Being</em>. Today, my archival conversation with the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai. The former Kenyan ruler Daniel arap Moi publicly called her a madwoman. She was arrested and beaten for protesting illegal logging and land grabbing — and once for leading an historic march of women demanding the release of their sons from Daniel arap Moi’s political prisons.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>So much of your work has been with women, and you write a lot about the balance of power between men and women. And I wanted to ask if you think of that, the balance of power between men and women, also as a sustainability issue?</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>The truth of the matter is we are all resources anyway. We are a human resource. And the biggest problem that we have had, especially in the women’s movement, is trying to convince the other half that we are a very important resource and we do make great contributions, and therefore we should be respected, we should be appreciated, our work should be quantified, we should be compensated, and that we should not be taken for granted. Now, unfortunately, 30 years ago, in 1975, as I said earlier, when we were meeting to go to Mexico, we were going there because we wanted to …</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>For the United Nations Women’s Conference, the first one.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>… Women’s Conference, the very first one. And it was at that conference that we declared the women decade. Obviously we have made great strides, and we should be very, very proud of the strides we have made. But it is true that women are still a very unappreciated resource in many societies. I can see how quickly women, even very competent women, are sacrificed on the altar of political convenience.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>That’s a strong sentence. Over these years, it’s not all been happy ceremonies planting trees. I know you’ve been scorned and you’ve been pursued and you’ve been beaten. You’ve stood up to powerful forces. And you didn’t know, when all this started, that it would become so large, that you would found this great movement, that you would win the Nobel Peace Prize. What kept you going? What were the resources you drew on in the hardest times?</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Now, again, I would probably say that that is where the experience and the being molded by people of faith made a lot of difference — that although I was not professing my faith, I’m quite sure that I was grounded in that moral fiber of wanting to do the right thing. I was so sure that this was the right thing because I could see. It was quite obvious. And even those who were persecuting me knew, and I knew they knew.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>Knew that you were doing the right thing?</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Yeah, they knew I was doing the right thing, but they didn’t want me to do it because it was inconveniencing them. And I knew that, the fact that people have a right to clean drinking water. So anybody who is there polluting that water knows he is doing the wrong thing, knows he should not do it. Anybody who is interfering with the catchment areas where these levees come from so that some levees start drying up, he knows he’s doing the wrong thing. And because he’s doing it to enrich himself, and he is enriching himself with resources that have been entrusted to him by the public, and he knows the public don’t know, and if they know they are too afraid to challenge him. So me, when I challenge, he can afford to intimidate, he can afford to ridicule, because I’m alone. But I somehow — I had that conviction that I’m right, and he knows it.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>Now, it sounds to me like you always assumed that there was a morality, a conscience somewhere, even inside the people who were — or an ability to see what you saw about what was right.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>It was too obvious for people not to see.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>Yeah, but it would also have been possible for you to just write these people off, to fight them, to declare them evil. Do you know what I’m saying?</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>But I didn’t have the power to do anything to them. They had the power. That’s why they could arrest me; they could take me to jail; they could ridicule me publicly. They had the power. I didn’t have the power. I couldn’t do anything. So the only thing I had, the option I had was to work with these ordinary people and try to teach them. Initially, I didn’t do any teaching. But gradually, when I saw that people were being taken advantage of because they were ignorant, I started reading the Bible, the book of Hosea …</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>Reading the prophets?</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Yeah, the prophet. I wanted to know, what did the prophets do when these things happened? And I read about the book of Hosea. Sometimes it’s fascinating to read about these old Bible stories and see — and sometimes the stories you read, they are almost replicated in the world we live in. So I read, for example, the book of Hosea quite often, and it talks about this prophet who is sent to the people of Israel to tell them they will perish because they are so ignorant. And he said, you’re ignorant and even the priests are ignorant, and you are not listening to the instructions of the Lord, and so you will perish.</p> <p>So I saw literally that our people were perishing because they were ignorant. They didn’t understand the linkages between the problems they were facing and the environmental degradation that was happening right there below their feet.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>It’s an interesting model too, because what the prophets were doing, what you were doing in a sense is railing against your own people for their sake.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Yeah, telling them that — open your eyes and see that what we are doing is very, very important. Don’t be intimidated; don’t be persuaded by these people who are in power, because whatever they are doing, they’re doing it against your good and the good of your children. So at least plant trees, for goodness sake. And by planting trees you are not harming anybody. You’re not harming them. But I knew that they didn’t like what I was doing.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>It’s kind of an ecological form of civil disobedience, planting trees.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>It was, in fact. It was, indeed. And, indeed, it became a symbol of our defiance every time. For example, we wanted to protect our forests that the people in power were privatizing. For example, I remember we had a big fight over a forest called Karura, which is close to the — it is actually within Nairobi, and it is actually essentially the land of Nairobi, the equivalent of Central Park in New York. They wanted to clear-cut this forest and put up residential houses. And I said, “Are you out of your mind? You need this forest.” And they said, “We don’t need the forest; we need houses.” Now, you tell me.</p> <p>So we would take trees and march with our seedlings towards the forest and say we are marching to go and plant trees. Now, ordinarily nobody should be bothered about a bunch of women trying to plant a tree, but because we are marching towards this forest, we were essentially saying, you’re not going to clear-cut this forest. You’re not going to put any residential houses in this forest, because this forest is needed by the city.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>And did you win that battle?</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>After many years we won, which is great. And that little forest is still there, thank God.</p> <p>[<em>music: “Brrrlak!” by Zap Mama</em>]</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>We started out talking about growing up, and within your culture trees were holy places, or they created holy places. You had a Catholic upbringing, and then you read the Prophet Hosea when you were fighting some of your darkest battles.</p> <p>I want to ask you about your image of God. How do you think about — that’s a hard — I don’t usually ask people a direct question like that, but I’d be really curious about your response to it. What does your work with trees, all the work you’ve done, the battles you’ve fought, and, in your new awareness of the importance of democratic spaces, how does all of that flow into your understanding of these big religious questions?</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>When I was in a Catholic school in Nyeri, which is where I was doing my primary education, I was actually being taught by sisters of the Consolata Order, Order of the Consolata, who come from Milan, by the way. Their founder recently became beatified, by the way, so they’re on the right track. At that time, I must say that religion was extremely superficial in the way that God was presented to us, because God was presented to us in the way he appears in the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. So at that time it was, I would say, a very superficial presentation of God, almost like a human person. And with the mind of a young person, you almost felt like, yeah, God is somewhere in Rome or somewhere in the sky, in the clouds. And then, of course, you remember, my own background. I was already removed from my own background, because my parents had already converted into Christianity.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>From Kikuyu culture.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Yes. But there was always that influence of, for example, the fact that they believed that God lived on Mount Kenya, and they had a great reverence to Mount Kenya. And so in the course of my environmentalism, I have often visited those two concepts of the way my ancestors presented God to me and the missionaries presented God to me.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>So, the Sistine Chapel or Mount Kenya.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Yeah. Now, where is God? And I tell myself, of course, now we are in a completely new era when we are learning to find God not in a place but rather in ourselves, in each other, in nature. In many ways it’s a contradiction because the church teaches you that God is omnipresent. Now, if he is omnipresent, he is in Rome, but he can also be in Kenya at the same time, if he is omnipresent.</p> <p>So I have had this transformation for me of who God is. I still believe strongly that there is that power. His shape, his size, his color, I have no idea. But you are influenced by what you hear, what you see. But I still — when I look on Mount Kenya, it is so magnificent, it is so overpowering. It is so important in sustaining life in my area that sometimes I say, yes, God is on this mountain.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>Thank you so much, Wangari Maathai.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>Most welcome.</p> <p>[<em>music: “Elyne Road” by Toumani Diabate</em>]</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>As we finished this conversation, Wangari Maathai sang me a song from Green Belt Movement.</p> <p><b>Ms. Maathai:</b>This kind of song would be very appropriate, because when we are moving, we always want it to be peaceful. So singing religious songs was a very common thing. It says there is no God like him. There is no love like his. And there is no strength like his.</p> <p>[<em>Wangari Maathai singing in Swahili</em>]</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>Wangari Maathai founded the global Green Belt Movement, which has contributed today to the planting of over 52 million trees. She was the 2004 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She died of cancer on September 25th, 2011 at the age of 71. Her books include a memoir, <em>Unbowed</em>, and <em>Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World</em>. She’s also one of the 100 heroic women featured in the book<em> Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.</em></p> <p>[<em>music: “Still Young” by Evenings</em>]</p> <p><b>Staff:</b>On Being is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Maia Tarrell, Marie Sambilay, Erinn Farrell, Laurén Dørdal, Tony Liu, Bethany Iverson, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Profit Idowu, Casper ter Kuile, Angie Thurston, Sue Phillips, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Damon Lee, Suzette Burley, Katie Gordon, Zack Rose, and Serri Graslie.</p> <p><b>Ms. Tippett:</b>The On Being Project is located on Dakota Land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.</p> <p><em>On Being</em> was created at American Public Media. Our funding partners include:</p> <p>The John Templeton Foundation, harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing human kind. Learn about cutting-edge research on the science of generosity, gratitude, and purpose at <a href="http://templeton.org/discoveries">templeton.org/discoveries</a>.</p> <p>The George Family Foundation, in support of the Civil Conversations Project.</p> <p>The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at <a href="http://fetzer.org/">fetzer.org</a>.</p> <p>Kalliopeia Foundation, working to create a future where universal spiritual values form the foundation of how we care for our common home.</p> <p>Humanity United, advancing human dignity at home and around the world. 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