Taking Root Documentary. Wangari Maathai Institute. The Wangari Maathai Foundation. The vision of the Wangari Maathai Foundation is a world in which individuals acknowledge their capacity to be a force for positive transformation like Wangari Maathai was. Condolences from World Leaders and Friends. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in to plant trees across Kenya, alleviate poverty and end conflict.
She was driven by a perceived connection between environmental degradation and poverty and conflict. She mobilized Kenyans, particularly women, to plant more than 30 million trees, and inspired the United Nations to launch a campaign that has led to the planting of 11 billion trees worldwide.
More than , Kenyan women benefited from her tree-planting campaign by selling seedlings for reforestation. Maathai recognized that purposeful political leadership can achieve positive social change. She remained undaunted. President Moi stepped down in , providing Ms. Maathai with a friendlier political climate. She won a parliamentary election and became assistant minister of the environment. Not long after, the ruling party dismissed her from the cabinet for involvement in opposition politics.
She subsequently lost her parliamentary seat during a dubious election. She embodied social activism and knew no separation between her commitment to nature and social justice. While she planted millions of trees in Kenya with many of her fellow campaigners and fought for the conservation of natural forests, she always sowed peaceful cohesion and reconciliation.
She exemplified the unity of democracy and social justice in a very practical and authentic manner. She was an Assistant Minister for Environment in Kenya but left the government when the then rainbow coalition failed to keep its promise of comprehensive constitutional reform. Wangari Maathai is famous far beyond Kenya and Africa for her courage, bravery and for the energy she exuded.
The list of honors in her name is long and impressive. The international community was often her invaluable shield that protected her against countless political threats in Kenya and attempts to intimidate her. During her lifetime, Prof. Wangari Maathai was defamed, attacked, imprisoned, sentenced and condemned by powerful local elites for her commitment to environmental, women's and human rights.
Others ridiculed her on international stage, trying to belittle and ignore her vigorous warnings of global warming, green house gases and desertification.
To date, the Green Belt Movement which she founded; and other social movements in Kenya actively preserve her legacy, as an ecologist, as a women's rights activist and a peacemaker. They revere, cherish and champion her legacy of being unbowed in effort to save the environment and roll back the devastating adverse effects of climate change.
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