Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Thirty Million Trees

In June 1977, on the outskirts of Nairobi, a line of rural women filed past a biologist, each receiving a handful of tree seedlings. With them she made a small arrangement: plant the trees, keep them alive, and for every seedling that survived, a few cents would be paid.

No speech, no ceremony. That seemingly trivial arrangement grew, over the next thirty years, into thirty million trees — and in 2004 it carried an African woman to a Nobel Peace Prize for the first time.

Her name was Wangari Maathai.

Wangari was born in 1940 in a mountain village in Nyeri, Kenya. Her childhood memories held a stream so clear she could see the pebbles on its bed; crouching beside it, helping her mother fetch water, she would count the tadpoles in the crevices between the stones. She was one of the few girls in her village sent to school — her mother sold crops and milked cows to pay for it — and she kept climbing: in the 1960s she went to the United States on an exchange program to study biology in Kansas, took a master's degree in Pittsburgh, and returned to the newly independent Kenya. In 1971 she earned a doctorate at the University of Nairobi, the first woman in East and Central Africa to hold a PhD; a few years later she became that university's first female department head.

By any script, what followed should have been a life of laboratories and lecture halls. But every visit home, the women of the countryside came to her with their troubles: the streams shrinking year by year, firewood to be carried from ever farther away, harvests that could no longer feed a family. Wangari crouched down and looked at the ground beneath their feet. The trees were gone; the rain carried off the topsoil; the streams had lost their sources. The logic was as simple as arithmetic — the problem was the missing trees, so why not plant them back?

In 1977, under the National Council of Women of Kenya, she founded the Green Belt Movement.

Its mechanics were simple almost to the point of naivety: teach rural women to raise seedlings and plant trees, and pay a small stipend per tree that survived. Within that "few cents" design lay all of Wangari's cunning. The seedlings could not be handed out for nothing; the trees had to stay alive; and the money had to land in the planter's own hands. For the first time the women earned an income of their own — and, more importantly, they discovered for the first time that the barren slope outside their doors was something they could change themselves. One woman's words when her first tree lived were repeated for years afterward: "So I don't just have to wait for my life to get better."

Over three decades the Green Belt Movement planted thirty million trees across Kenya and neighboring countries, and tens of thousands of women became guardian "tree mothers." The trees came back, then the streams, then the firewood within reach, then the birds.

Meanwhile Wangari's habit of minding other people's business kept growing. In 1989, developers planned a sixty-story tower in Uhuru Park — the last public green space in central Nairobi. Government officials mocked her as a madwoman who "didn't understand progress." She didn't argue. She wrote letters, gathered testimony, and mobilized citizens, sending objection after objection to the investors' doors. The project collapsed, the money withdrew, and the park survived. A decade later she led a planting party into Karura Forest, which was being carved up by well-connected developers, and was attacked and injured. Her memoir describes it with startling calm: the sticks broke; she did not.

In 2004 the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to this "woman of trees," citing her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace. At the ceremony she told the story she had told a thousand times: A forest catches fire. All the animals flee — except one little hummingbird, which flies back and forth, carrying drops of water in its beak, one at a time. The big animals laugh at it: "You're tiny. The fire is enormous. What good can you do?" And the hummingbird answers, "I am doing the best I can."

Then she looked out at the audience and said: we should all be hummingbirds.

Her words that traveled farthest, though, were plainer: "It's the little things citizens do that will make the difference. My little thing is to plant trees."

Wangari Maathai died in September 2011, at seventy-one. She did not live to see the Green Belt Movement's trees pass fifty million — the women counted that for her afterward. But across Kenya's hills and valleys the green belts had grown into weather of their own. And along the path of that clear stream of her childhood, children can now be found crouching at the water's edge, counting the tadpoles that have come back to the crevices between the stones.

The world is never changed by people who have all the answers. It is changed by people who begin. Thirty million trees — and every single one began as a few cents and a promise.