Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai

by Emily Gertz

Published April 14, 2009 @ 08:02PM PT

What does planting trees have to do with women's rights, democracy, and ending poverty? Ask Wangari Maathai.

In 1977, Maathai began organizing rural women in Kenya to plant trees, so that they wouldn't have to walk for hours to find food and fuel. Her Green Belt Movement grew into a national force for environmental restoration, women's equality, and democracy. Tonight, a new documentary about Maathai (a recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient) is being broadcast on public television -- part of the Independent Lens series. Check here for local listings of when it will air near you.

"Taking Root" relies mostly on the words of Maathai, her colleagues, and the women of the Green Belt Movement to tell Kenya's story. The Green Belt Movement wasn't an aesthetic or Romantic movement for beautification. Planting and tending these trees began to restore Kenya's forests, largely destroyed after a century of colonization and revolution. If the forests survived, the women's lives would be materially improved.

In 2005, Maathai told an interviewer,

Many women in rural areas said they were concerned about firewood, which was the main source of energy. They were concerned about water; there wasn’t adequate clean drinking water. They were concerned about nutritious food, and they were concerned about poverty, especially among women. I immediately suggested that perhaps what we should do with these women is to plant trees. I saw the connection between land degradation and lack of water.

Tending their trees also gave village women a reason to gather and discuss their problems and how to solve them -- and soon they were working together nationally to reverse environmental destruction, poverty, government corruption, political imprisonments and torture, and the legacy of colonial oppression.

Organizing ever more outspoken and visible protests, Maathai and the Green Belt members eventually found themselves in political and physical confrontation with the regime of Kenyan dictator Daniel arap Moi, who had abrogated the right of association and outlawed group gatherings. Although Moi targeted them for reprisals (Maathai was among many women badly beaten by police during a months-long protest in 1992), the Green Belt members ultimately helped bring down his 24-year dictatorship.

And to date, it's planted over 35 million trees.

Maathai's work, like no one else's, has demonstrated the intricate links between environmental degradation and poverty, sexism, government corruption and political oppression -- and how their solutions are just as much intertwined.