New Zealand Celsias

“A mad woman,” said Kenyan President Arap Moi in 1992, “a threat to the order and security of the country.” He spoke of Wangari Maathai  . A few years before he had suggested in a public speech that she learn to be a proper woman in the African tradition and respect men and be quiet. Some hope.  

Initiator in 1997 of the Green Belt Movemen  t, which engaged rural women in extensive tree planting for environmental restoration and better livelihood, she faced down later government opposition and was involved in stormy and dangerous confrontations. In 2004 she became the first African woman, and the first environmentalist, to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.

I’ve just read her 2009 book The Challenge for Africa.  It’s a thoughtful analysis of the loss of culture suffered by African groupings in the colonial past and of the persistence in African political life today of that legacy of loss. She urges Africans to free themselves of a sense of cultural inferiority and to recover respect for their own cultures, to the extent that they can be discerned after the long period of destruction and neglect. 

She points to the dangers of centralised power and urges systems of governance which allow the micro-nations within the larger states formed by the colonial powers to have voice in the policies of their country. In chapter after thoughtful chapter she offers discerning comment on the many political problems which beset African development.

But for the purposes of this Celsias review I’ll concentrate on the environmental issues Maathai covers. In a chapter entitled Environment and Development she points out that the UN Millennial Development Goals (MDGs) depend heavily on healthy ecosystems.  The goal which speaks of ensuring environmental sustainability is comparatively neglected, but in her view it is the most important and the others should be organised around it. (The other seven, for readers not familiar with them, are the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, and developing a global partnership for development.)

Specifically she writes about the deterioration of the environment on and around Mount Kenya and the Aberdare mountain ranges.  Deforestation, illegal logging, nonindigenous plantations, overcultivation – all the usual suspects – threaten water flows and rainfall patterns and lead to loss of enormous amounts of topsoil and many other deleterious flow-on effects.   If this continues it will make it impossible to achieve the MDGs in Kenya.  She points to the delayed development in neighbouring Ethiopia attributable to the reduction of forest cover from 40 percent of the country at the turn of the 20th century to only 3 percent today. 

Monoculture plantations of nonindigenous trees will not make up for the loss of forest. They are tree farms not forests. They destroy local biodiversity. They lack the capacity to receive and conserve rainwater. The Green Belt Movement has demonstrated, through its plantings in the degraded forests in the Aberdares, that in the tropics Nature has an extraordinary capacity to regenerate in comparatively short time frames. All the more distressing that the current Kenyan government is planning to reintroduce plantation planting stopped under the previous administration.

In poorer countries and communities concern for environmental issues tends to be treated as a luxury. It is certainly not in Maathai’s view. Protecting and restoring ecosystems and slowing or reversing global warming are matters of life and death for such communities.  Desertification is on the march in Africa and is part of the reason for the Darfur conflict.  African governments need to wake up to the priority of the environmental sector in terms of budget allocation. Defence ministry budgets dwarf those of environmental ministries. She dryly observes: “No amount of advanced weaponry can fight the desert.”   

Climate change threatens Africa enormously in coming years. Saving the forests is an essential global element in fighting against that threat. Africans are not serious contributors to the emissions which feed global warming, but the forests Africa contains are recognised as a significant bulwark against warming. 

17 percent of the world’s forests are in Africa, with the highest deforestation rate in the world, at approximately half a percent annually. Maathai sees Africa doing its part in the global challenge by prioritizing the protection and rehabilitation of its forests. Money to assist this can come through carbon trading arrangements such as that which the Green Belt Movement has arranged with the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund.  If we lose forests we lose the fight against climate change.

An interesting chapter details efforts being made to save the Congo Basin forests.  They have an impact on weather patters not merely locally but also throughout the continent and, by the estimation of scientists, even further afield. 

In 2005 Maathai was asked by the heads of state of the ten countries that have within their borders parts of the Congo Basin to serve as the goodwill ambassador for the Congo Basin Rainforest Ecosystem.  She has been active in her role and records substantial $100 million funding pledges to date from the UK and Norwegian governments.

“Bringing back what is essential so we can move forward,” is Maathai’s message.  It includes not only restoring forests, but also “speaking our languages, telling our stories, and not dismissing the lives of our ancestors.”  The challenge for Africa matters for Africans, but this wise book also makes it clear that it matters for us all.   

Read more great stories on Celsias:

Action Needed to Prevent New Sudan War

Climate Change in Africa

Follow us on Twitter!