«The Wangari Maathai green belt movement is driven by and for Kenyan rural women. What began with the plantation of a few tree seeds grew to transform Kenya’s political landscape and the world. Maathai trained thousands of women in many things from water conservation to civil leadership and, to date, have planted 35 million trees in a country devastated by deforestation. By the way, they also helped overthrow a dictatorship.

Forests that disappear

In 1977, the Wangari Maathai biologist attended the call of Rural Women of Kenya. Typically responsible for collecting firewood and growing food, these women were seriously beaten by the effects of mass deforestation in Kenya. They saw their wooden source disappear and how the ground dried and eroded.

Maathai’s solution was to teach them to plant and grow new trees. The trees provided the necessary shadow and prevented the soil from disappearing due to the action of water. Growing up, they would provide wood and construction materials, as well as fruits to combat malnutrition. The trees also meant a rare opportunity for revenue generation for rural women. The new Maathai organization, called «green belt movement», paid women a small sum for each tree they planted.

The women organized, armed tree nurseries and exchanged accumulated knowledge for years of experience at work with the earth and became what Maathai calls «silvicultters without diplomas.»

Make connections

The more he investigated solutions for Kenya’s environmental problems, Maathai, the more he realized that these were simply symptoms of a much greater cause. She says it was impossible to disconnect the country’s natural resources from social problems, their economy and their policy.

«The issues and problems that people were raising were the symptoms of problems that needed to attack root. And so I continued to go more and more towards the root. I started dealing with politics, democracy, conflicts, the rights of vulnerable, women and children ».

Confront power

Maathai’s activism began to make waves in the country’s policy, which often put her, and her followers, in danger. In the sight of the Kenyan dictator Daniel Arap Moi, he was regularly arrested and imprisoned, he was even forced to a temporary exile. During a demonstration, the police hit her until she left her unconscious.

But the movement had become strong and the impulse of the Organization of Women of the Green Belt, driven by Maathai, began to change the political tide. He took as a personal mission to protect a forest strip that was being divided and put in auction for government followers. Men, women, students and the international community demonstrated aligned behind it with such force that helped to unseat MOI in 2002.

That same year, Maathai ran for the Kenyan Parliament, and won his bank with 98 percent of the votes. The following year, she was appointed Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

Trees for peace

As a parliamentarian, he encouraged military personnel to plant trees around his barracks, telling them «have a weapon in one hand and a tree in the other.» The soldiers hugged the environmental cause to see the connection between defending the territory and defending Kenya’s natural resources.

Today, Maathai’s activism for the environment and human rights has grown until Kenya’s borders. The green belt movement combats environmental devastation and promotes the empowerment of women throughout Africa and the world. «

Wangari mUsed September 25 After an ovar cancer – today we honor their delivery and activism in favor of women and the earth.

From the page «Global Fund for Women» http://www.imow.org/wpp/stories/viewstory?language=es&storyid=1239

Documentary on the green belt movement http://takingrootfilm.com/index.htm