November 6, 2006VOL. 44, NO. 19Oakland, CA

Nobel Peace laureate
Kenyan forest activist credits Catholic Sisters

By Sharon Abercrombie
Staff writer

Around the campus of Mt. St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, she was known as “Mary Jo,” a talented science major whom one nun predicted “would give every ounce of energy to the biology that she so loved.” Sister Joan Marie Brazel’s assessment of her student couldn’t have been more accurate.

“Mary Jo” Wangari Maathai, a cradle Catholic who received her early religious training from a group of Italian missionary Sisters in her Kenyan village and went on to become a 1964 graduate of Mt. St. Scholastica, (now Benedictine College), has given her entire life to restoring the indigenous forests of her native land.

As founder of the Green Belt Movement in 1977, Maathai and her mostly women’s group of activists have planted over 30 million trees throughout the country to produce sustainable wood for fuel use and to combat soil erosion.

Maathai shared some of her life and work on Oct. 30, when she spoke to a packed house at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. A recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in furthering the causes of the environment, women’s empowerment and human rights, she is currently on a U.S. book tour promoting her new autobiography, “Unbowed.” When she walked to the podium, Maathai received a standing ovation.

Dressed in an elegant but simple green and gold African dress and turban, the laureate was welcomed by Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates. Then she was serenaded by composer Sharon Abreau, a composer from Washington’s Orcas Island and a member of the Women’s Global Green Action Network of Berkeley. Abreau had written a song/chant, bearing Maathai’s name, with the words, “Wangari, you shine bright as the morning star, you have helped us to understand that peace on earth needs a living land.”

Wangari Maathai, a graduate of Mt. St. Scholastica College, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Looking out over the crowd, a visibly touched and delighted Maathai smiled broadly and noted, “I knew when I came to Berkeley that I would be talking to a crowd of fellow environmentalists who share a strong commitment to nature.”

Wangari Maathai’s own commitment has hardly been a pain-free proposition. Along the tree planting route, she managed to enrage the highest ranking politicos running the country.

According to the Greenbelt website, she was beaten and jailed for campaigning against deforestation in Africa. At one point, she had to take refuge in a safe house to avoid being murdered. She and her husband, Mwang, a member of parliament, divorced in the 1980’s due to her activism. In ‘Unbowed,” she writes that he called her “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.”

But in the long run, Wangari Maathai triumphed. She is the only African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is the only Nobel winner who is a graduate of a Catholic college in America.

She now serves as assistant minister of environment, natural resources and wildlife in Kenya in a new government administration which shares many of her ideals and dreams.
Since 2002, for the first time, the government is starting to provide free education to elementary school children and scholarships to poor high school students, assistance to children orphaned by AIDS, and is working to advance environmental reform, said Maathai.

The country’s past government of Daniel arap Moi, which she said ignored the needs of the people, couldn’t cope with the upstart woman and her Greenbelt followers because the activists went too far in challenging the status quo.

“If you women would only plant trees, we wouldn’t bother you. But because you are talking about corruption and misgovernance, we don’t like you,” one official told her.

When Maathai began her environmental work she didn’t initially anticipate taking on the establishment, she said. All she knew was her beloved homeland was much different from what it was before she studied at Mt. Scholastica and then at the University of Nair in Germany for her doctorate.

During her Berkeley talk, she recalled an idyllic childhood spent in nature. The weather was perfect and she could drink clean water from the local streams. She reminisced about gathering slate-colored frog eggs out of the stream, watching them slip through her fingers
glimmering like cultured pearls.

But when she returned to Kenya in the late ‘60’s, many of the beautiful forests had been replaced by cash crops of coffee, tea and sugar cane. “Cutting down the indigenous forests and replacing them with exotic species of trees caused everything else to die,” she writes on her web site.

As she became involved in the women’s movement, Maathai heard the complaints of the poor women of her country about the polluted drinking water which was sickening their children, the droughts that were killing the nomads and their animals, the ruined forests, which were the source of their firewood needed for cooking.

Maathai realized these ills “were part of a deeper problem – bad government policies. It was necessary to change the political system to save the environment,” she said during her talk.

“We needed a holistic solution to remove a
repressive system which had ruled for 40 years.”

Holistic reform, however, can be as difficult to bring about at the grass roots level as it is at the top, Maathai said.

“People are afraid. Their fear and their hopelessness and their ignorance make them very heavy. It takes a lot to get to them to lift themselves up,” she told her Berkeley audience

Her work began woman by woman, tree by tree. Realizing that she was not working with university students, Maathai found herself getting involved in basic community organizing. She would tell the women to “meet and decide what you want to do. Elect your leaders. Plant the trees only as far as you can walk. Teach the women in the next village how to plant the trees. In this way, we are teaching one another to rise up and walk.”

Her plan included giving the women a small amount of money for their efforts, thus helping them to support their families.

Maathai likened the work to a story in Acts of the Apostles, when Peter and John healed a crippled man. They had no money to give to the beggar, but they gave him what they had: they healed him. “Peter holds him by the hand, and the beggar needs to rise up and walk. He feels healed. He walks to the synagogue praising the Lord. I presume the beggar never comes back to beg.”

The beggar was “at the bottom of powerlessness. Then someone gave him a hand and told him to rise up and walk,” she said.

Maathai expressed gratitude to the Italian Catholic missionary Sisters of her childhood who were so important in her religious grounding. Of the Benedictine Sisters in Kansas, she said, “They served selflessly. They gave a hand, like Peter did. They are like flowers that bloom, that smile, even when you don’t give them water.”

In a press release from Benedictine College, written shortly after Maathai received the Nobel Prize, she credited the Sisters for providing her, not only with a full scholarship, but for creating an atmosphere of family.

“They treated me as if I were their daughter.

They gave and gave to everyone. I think this is where I got my deep sense of service and my detachment from things material.”

Benedictine Sister Thomasita Homan, a long-time friend of Maathai’s and a teacher at Benedictine College, attended the Nobel awards in Oslo two years ago. Sister Homan presented the laureate with a congratulatory scrapbook from members of her class.

In an e-mail to The Voice, Sister Homan said she recently attended her old friend’s talk in Decorah, Iowa. “I finally made it to the table where she was signing books. It was a marvelous moment. Then she took my book, grinned up at me and signed, “Mary Jo.”
Of her Nobel prize, Maathai notes, “This was the first time the selection committee brought all of us who work separately for the causes of women, democracy and the environment together under one umbrella.”

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