As we progressively understood the causes of environmental degradation, we saw the need for good governance. Indeed, the state of any county's environment is a reflection of the kind of governance in place, and without good governance there can be no peace. Many countries, which have poor governance systems, are also likely to have conflicts and poor laws protecting the environment.

~ Nobel Lecture, Wangari Maathai, Oslo, 10 December 2004 ~

While looking for some items for our peace by peace, I was led to Wangari's page on her Nobel lecture in 2004. Aware of our indigenous people's struggle for their lands with the issues on land grabbing, mining, and others, I hope to find inspiration on how Wangari led the people of Kenya to come up with a solution to their struggle for environment. I was just starting to know her when recently I learned of her death in a paper. And I guess I was also led to the article (below) to know a few more things of what she had done.

Heaven is Green – Celebrating the life of Wangari Maathai

29th September 2011 - by Ellen Teague

It is a great tribute to Wangari Maatthai, who died on Sunday aged
71, that her name was one of the worldwide trends on twitter yesterday.
Already famous for founding Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement which planted
more than 30 million trees, her name went global in 2004 when she won
the Nobel Peace Prize for her work to protect the environment and ensure
sustainable development in Africa. 

She was the first environmentalist and the first African woman to
receive the honour. Wangari provided livelihoods for tens of thousands
of African women, helping them earn much-needed income from their
seedlings and creating a ready source of firewood, fodder, building
material, and even food from fruit trees that they control.
Internationally, she worked with the UN and others to create a world
based on ecological integrity, social and economic justice, democracy,
non-violence, and peace. Wangari was the inspiration behind UN
Environment Programme’s Billion Tree Campaign, launched in 2006. She
became a patron of the campaign, inspiring thousands of people across
the world to plant trees for the benefit of their communities. To date,
over 11 billion trees have been planted.

In interviews after receiving the Nobel prize she often spoke about
her motivation and spirituality. Her Kikuyu family embraced Christianity
when she was a small child and she was educated in Catholic mission
schools before winning a scholarship to a Catholic university in Kansas
to study biology – Mt. St. Scholastica College, which is now known as
Benedictine College. Upon returning to Kenya, she was the first woman in
East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, obtaining it from
the University of Nairobi in 1971. She said the nuns at the mission
schools taught her “to serve people who are in trouble or disadvantaged”
and “my teachers gave me a deep sense of justice and fairness that
influenced me to work for human rights, and to desire human rights not
only for myself but also for other people; eventually, this made me
understand why it is very important to expand that concept of justice to
other species.”

Yet, despite saying she was moulded by people of faith, she also
found shortcomings in the Church. As a young child in school she was
taught that God was somewhere in Rome or somewhere in the sky. “I must
say that religion was extremely superficial in the way that God was
presented to us, because God was the way he appears in the Sistine
Chapel, you know, by Michelangelo” she said. Yet, her Kikuyu background
taught her to believe that God lived on Mount Kenya. “Of course, now we
are in a completely new era when we are learning to find God not in a
place, but rather in ourselves, in each other, in nature” she said.
“When I look on Mount Kenya, it is so magnificent, it is so
overpowering; it is so important in sustaining life in my area that
sometimes I say, yes, God is on this mountain.” When Wangari’s Nobel
prize was announced in 2004 she planted a celebratory tree in the shadow
of Mount Kenya.

However, she continued to be inspired by texts of the world’s great
faiths, especially the Bible. “The more I have understood the importance
of the environment in our lives and the importance of other species to
our own survival, the more I have gone to the Bible” she once said. She
felt that the loving God described in Genesis has given us a wonderful
planet with all the essential things we need, and that many of the
problems in Africa of diseases, poverty, hunger are not punishments from
that loving God, but rather come from a human failure to utilize
properly the resources that God has given us. She liked reading the
Book of Hosea Chapter 4, where the prophet is sent to the people of
Israel to tell them they will perish, because they are so ignorant. She
felt many people, particularly those in power in Kenya and some
international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, are
ignorant in not recognising the linkages between the problems human
society is facing and environmental degradation. She lamented that so
often people in power work against the good of ordinary people. “So at
least plant trees, for goodness sake” she said; “by planting trees you
are not harming anybody”.

She felt the destruction of God’s creation should be a major concern for
Christians. With the understanding we have now of the linkages between
the environment, the way we govern ourselves and our resources, and the
way we can live with each other in peace in this world, churches and the
faithful should be in the forefront. “Theologians and religious leaders
need to tell their faithful that they must do something for the
environment and give them good examples of what they can do” she urged;
“after all, this creation, this biodiversity, is the creation Genesis
talks about in the first book”.

She participated in several conferences on World Religions and
Ecology, most especially in 1998 at the UN and the American Museum of
Natural History in New York. She spoke eloquently at Fr Thomas Berry’s
memorial service in 2009 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New
York. She delivered an inspiring video message in 2005 at the UN at the
celebration of the 50th anniversary of Teilhard de Chardin’s death. Her
final book Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing
Ourselves and the World (Doubleday, 2010) is a splendid summary of her
vision for our world.

I saw her once in London, on her way into a packed hall for a
speaking engagement soon after receiving her Nobel prize. She was a star
in every way, from her radiant smile and wave to everybody present to
the massive bow in her hair made of brightly coloured African cloth. But
she was most at home among Kenya’s rural women, planting seedlings or
sitting under mature trees that she had planted. She once said that she
thought heaven is green. I hope she is finding out that she was right.