Wangari Maathai takes top honours for her fight to save Mother Earth

She is the first woman in Central and Eastern Africa to hold a PhD; the first woman to head a university department in Kenya; the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize; and the 12th UN Messenger of Peace — with a special focus on the environment and climate change.

That is Wangari Muta Maathai for you.

For over a decade, the rugged activist remained a thorn in the flesh of former president Daniel arap Moi and his administration, especially when the thirst for public land became insatiable among the political elite, and an ‘idle’ Uhuru Park parcel proved irresistible.

Ms Maathai’s battle to keep the piece of earth from the jaws of a corrupted political monster — which planned to build a multi-storey building (the Kenya Times Media Trust headquarters) in the park — is probably her best yet, and the amount of support she managed to amass through her Green Belt Movement set the stage for a brand of environmental activism that is still vibrant today.

“Forests can live without us, but we can’t live without them” is her standard refrain to those who itch to cut down a tree.

And, true to her passion for the environment, she had to endure police truncheons on several occasions, which culminated in head injuries in 1999 after she was attacked while planting trees in Karura Forest, Nairobi.

Her current globe-trotting stature is a pale shadow of her days as a Member of Parliament and the assistant minister for Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife, back in 2005.

Her movement, founded in 1977, has planted more than 10 million trees so far, a huge feat when viewed against a 1989 United Nations report that noted that Africa was only planting nine trees for every 100 she cut down!

Her work as an environmentalist has transcended Kenya’s borders, and this has found true expression in her adoption of a Japanese concept known as mottainai, which embraces not only her core campaign message of the 3Rs (re-use, recycle and reduce), but also urges respect, gratitude and utilisation of resources without wasting or over-consuming.

Ms Maathai’s unrelenting voice on the need for Kenyans to be respectful, grateful and accountable to future generations in their utilisation of environmental resources has reawakened the country’s collective consciousness on the dangers of unchecked deforestation through open theft and the shamba system.

In her autobiography, Unbowed, she explores her roots and the challenges she faced in an inspiring message of hope and prosperity through self-sufficiency. In this way, she has strived to instill a sense of cross-generational responsibility as the basis of our political and socio-economic interactions.

Her latest appearance on the environment stage was during the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference.