 |
|
|
|
| 2/16/2009 12:26:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article | Nobel Laureate makes area appearance
Maathai speaks on Green Belt Movement
KATHRYN EAKENS
Leader Staff
GEORGETOWN - "The women were talking about food. They don't have adequate food - that they don't have adequate energy, which is mostly from firewood; that they don't have an income and they don't have clean drinking water."
Those four issues being experienced in 1977 by the women in the Kenyan countryside where Wangari Maathai spent her childhood were the beginning of what would become a movement to restore the forests of a nation.
In 2004, Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the Green Belt Movement, which she founded to encourage groups to plant trees to prevent soil erosion, provide firewood and produce food.
The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree - receiving her Ph.D. in anatomy from the University of Nairobi where she joined the faculty there as chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy - detailed her experience and emphasized the importance of environmental sustainability in Central Texas recently when she delivered the 2009 Shilling Lecture at Southwestern University in Georgetown Feb. 10. The lecture series was established in 1999 to honor the university's 13th president, Roy B. Shilling Jr., and his wife, Margaret.
Maathai said she first learned of the plight of the women of the Kenyan countryside while preparing for an international women's conference hosted by the United Nations.
During the course of their conversations she said it became clear many of the forests she knew as a child had been cleared to make way for the farming of tea and coffee and that eucalyptus, pines and other once foreign trees had been introduced into the landscape.
"When the British came into the country and wanted to farm the land it was too wet, and they decided they needed somebody to help them dry the land. So they went to Australia and they brought eucalyptus, which became nicknamed locally 'water drinkers' because they took a lot of water from the soil," Maathai, who in 2002 was elected to Kenya's parliament with an overwhelming 98 percent of the vote, said. "Unfortunately at that time we were not as sensitive about the environment and so we were planting these trees that were drying up the wetlands.
"Little did we know that these wetlands are the water reservoirs that feed the streams and rivers and that these water reservoirs were very important for the weather, for the rainfall patterns and that this is the reason this part of the country was so rich in water and forests.
"The rainfall pattern was changing and during the rains much soil was being lost through erosion. Many streams were drying up and many of the big rivers that I knew as a child were reducing their volume of water drastically because of what was happening upstream in the forests.
"I realized the weather had changed because of the activities that were being carried out on the land and in the forest in the name of development, because that's what we were trying to do. We were trying to develop and develop very fast. And in developing we were removing the vegetation, clearing the forest and clearing the wood lots to make way for tea and coffee. We were even cutting some of the trees that were traditionally never cut because they were sacred trees. It appears these trees were important for the ecology of the land because they held the soils together and facilitated the absorption of rainwater so the underground water level was very high. "
Maathai began to encourage the women of the Kenyan countryside to plant trees to prevent soil erosion, provide firewood and produce food, and through the Green Belt Movement has helped women plant more than 30 million trees on their farms and in school and church compounds across the country. As a result of the Green Belt Movement, similar initiatives have been successfully launched in Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, among others.
"When we started talking with these women I encouraged them to plant trees," she said. "Initially they hesitated because they felt like they didn't know how to plant trees. They felt up to that time that God planted the trees. But now, because we were cutting so fast, God needed some help.
"Once the women learned how to do it, they became good at teaching each other and that became the trademark of the Green Belt Movement - ordinary people teaching each other how to be foresters; how to grow trees."
One of the most important aspects of the Green Belt Movement, Maathai said, was the introduction of civic and environmental education, which teaches the link between government and the management of the environment.
"We wanted people to understand that government and leadership is extremely important in the way the environment is managed," she said. "We wanted them to understand that if the government is not managing the resources in a responsible and accountable way and if the government is making people poor instead of enriching people you need to get rid of that government. And the way to hold the government accountable is to vote.
"When people ask me, 'How do you mobilize people?' I tell them it is impossible to plant trees enmasse if you do not have a mobilization tool and the only way is to give them some kind of civic and environmental education so they can see the need to take action. You have to get them out of their seats and make them want to take action - make them want to do something."
With Maathai looking on, Southwestern University President Jake N. Schrum took action to further the college's commitment to environmental leadership by signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which formally commits campuses to eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions over time and educate students about climate neutrality.
"Colleges and universities like Southwestern who believe in their core values have an obligation to be models for their students' support for sustainability, which is absolutely crucial to saving our planet," Schrum said.
Signatories to the Presidents Climate Commitment must pledge to complete an emissions inventory; set a target date within two years for becoming climate neutral, meaning emitting no greenhouse gases or offsetting emissions through energy credits and other methods; take immediate steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by choosing from a list of short-term actions; integrate sustainability into the curriculum and make it part of the educational experience; and make the action plan, inventory and progress reports publicly available.
Since 2006, more than 600 colleges and universities in all 50 states have signed the agreement, modeled after the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which has been signed by mayors in more than 900 cities, including Austin, Fort Worth and San Antonio. Southwestern is the 18th in Texas to sign the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment and only the second in the Central Texas region.
|
Article Comment Submission Form
|
|
|
|
|
NEWS
