(Photo by Henrik Hanson, on Unsplash.)
In 1977, Kenyan educator and women’s rights activist Wangari Maathai faced a decaying Kenyan countryside. As full-bodied streams dwindled to spines, and as the desert folded trees to dust, local communities struggled to gather enough food and water, and they had to trudge longer and longer distances to gather firewood (“Our History”).
A natural response may have been to turn to political powers to help these communities, but Maathai decided (in addition to her government work) to stir up the women of rural Kenya to enact their own rescue. Together, they became the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization with the mission to “strive for better environmental management, community empowerment, and livelihood improvement using tree-planting as an entry point” (“Who We Are”).
Maathai and the Shape of Culture
Born in Nyeri, Kenya in 1940, dying in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi seventy-one years after, Dr. Wangari Maathai’s achievements range from teaching veterinary anatomy to joining the Kenyan Parliament, addressing the UN at the Earth Summit, and being the “first black African woman to win a Nobel Prize” (“Wangari Maathai;” “Biography”). The Green Belt Movement, however, may be her most renowned legacy. According to their 2018 Annual Report, the movement worked together with “over 4,900 community groups,” as well as environmental organizations like Ecosia German, to plant 884,529 trees in one year (3). In all, the organization has planted “some 30 million trees” between 1977 and the early 21st century, restoring health both to the land and to the people ("Wangari Maathai").
In her writings about her work in rural Kenya, Maathai emphasizes the importance of reclaiming local culture, seeing it as vital to both the people’s identity and the health of their environment. In her article “The Cracked Mirror,” she asserts, “Too often, when we talk about conservation, we don’t think about culture. But we human beings have evolved in the environment in which we find ourselves… it shaped our values; it shaped our bodies; it shaped our religion. It really defined who we are and how we see ourselves” (Maathai).
When people live in one area for a long time, they learn how to live in relationship with it, gathering what they need while also helping the land to thrive. If the land gives out, so will they, so there’s good reason for them to try to live sustainably. As the generations pass, the people’s experience accumulates, developing and refining cultural practices in response to their environment, and in this way (among others), the land comes to shape their identity.
(Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. Photo from Wix.)
The Desecrated Mountain
It becomes a problem, then, when forces such as colonialism or globalization take away the culture of indigenous peoples. The people lose their identity and their land in a single blow. Maathai uses Mount Kenya as an example of this. Once considered “a holy mountain for [her] people, the Kikuyus,” Mount Kenya was seen as God’s home, overflowing with water and divine blessing for the community. At the time of Maathai’s writing, however, Mount Kenya was decaying—its glaciers melting beneath the shifting climate, its ridges scarred by clear-cutting and logging (Maathai). Maathai links this degradation to foreign missionaries, who she gives “all due respect,” but who nevertheless told the Kenyans, “God does not dwell on Mount Kenya. God dwells in heaven” (Maathai).
Though perhaps well-intended, the missionaries’ statement not only undermined a symbol of Kenyan identity, but also a tradition that had revered and stewarded the mountain’s health for generations. The missionaries may have been able to disagree with Kenyan spirituality while still respecting its importance to their identity and their environment, but instead, they degraded Mount Kenya altogether. They made it a place unworthy of protection, making way for the exploitation of what had once been holy land.
In light of this, we find that valuing one’s culture is not merely a sentimental notion. To preserve a culture is to preserve the distilled wisdom of countless generations. It assumes inheritance. The identity, the values, and the land that you receive from your ancestors, you pass on intact to your children, and as soon as you start thinking in terms of descendants, you need to think about sustainability. What values you pass on must allow your community to live together with the land—both giving and receiving, neither one destroying the other—for centuries to come.
Identity and Inheritance
Thinking over Maathai’s view of earth-care, I wonder how we could create a culture of sustainability in the United States. We are highly mobile, rarely staying in one place for a lifetime, let alone multiple generations, and we’re often isolated from our land. Still, there may be small ways of moving towards a more “rooted” culture. Some of these may include learning more about the sustainable traditions of American indigenous peoples, spreading environmental values through speech and writing, or finding practical ways of engaging with the land as a community. One example of the latter may be community gardening. The very act of planting as a group implies a long-term, collective commitment to nurturing seeds into adulthood, which sounds like a promising start to a more sustainable culture.
Aside from the other benefits that sustainability brings us, when we learn to care for the land, we develop our own sense of self. Maathai would affirm this. With the links between Kenyan land and Kenyan identity in mind, she argues, “Cultural liberation will only come when the minds of the people are set free and they can protect themselves from colonialism of the mind. Only that type of freedom will allow them to reclaim their identity, self-respect and destiny… And only then will they really appreciate their country and the need to protect its natural beauty and wealth” (Maathai). Since we are embodied, communal creatures, earth-care is an act of self-discovery. We become most ourselves by loving what is outside of us, and we secure our destiny by loving the generations beyond us.
(Mount Kenya. Picture taken by Håkon Dahlmo in August, 2003.
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
Works Cited
Annual Report 2018. The Green Belt Movement, 2018,
http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/sites/greenbeltmovement.org/files/2018%20Annual
%20Report.pdf#overlay-context=user/494. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020.
“Biography.” The Green Belt Movement, 2020, www.greenbeltmovement.org/who-we-are/our-
history. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020.
Maathai, Wangari. “The Cracked Mirror.” Resurgence Magazine, no. 227, 11 Nov. 2004, The
Green Belt Movement, http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai/key-
speeches-and-articles/the-cracked-mirror. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020.
“Our History.” The Green Belt Movement, 2020, www.greenbeltmovement.org/who-we-
are/our-history. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020.
“Wangari Maathai.” Britannica, 21 Sept. 2020,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wangari-Maathai. Accessed 24 Oct. 2020.
“Who We Are.” The Green Belt Movement, 2020, www.greenbeltmovement.org/who-we-
are/our-history. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020.
Thanks, Margaret! :) I'm grateful for your thoughts. That's a good quote from Greta Thunberg as well. I wonder if some of the disconnect for people is figuring out in what way to invest in the future. For instance, maybe some parents would invest in their nation's economic or political situation for their children's sake, but overlook the state of the environment. Either way, it's sad that people don't always make those connections between environmental health and our children's welfare.
Great article! That last line is especially poignant and made me think of when Greta Thunberg said, "You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes." How can people invest in their futures is so many ways, yet fail to see the connection between environmental destruction and any hope of a future worth having? Wangari Maathai knew what was up!