Wangari Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for teaching women in her native Kenya to plant trees. Of course, her work is much more complicated than that, but her call for democracy and for stewardship of the rural lands that feed and house so many Kenyans began with gathering seeds and planting them in the ground. In Maathai’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she recalled her childhood experience of visiting a stream next to her home to fetch water for her mother. She would drink water straight from the stream and play in the stream among frogs’ eggs that looked like beautiful beads. She said, “This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”
Besides contributing to the drying of the rivers, deforestation meant that Maathai’s people lacked firewood for cooking, so many of the children were malnourished from eating highly processed foods instead of their traditional foods. By grounding her work with the Green Belt Movement in reforestation, she helped solve both community development and ecological problems.
Her story is told in a remarkable film called Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, by Vermont filmmakers Lisa Merton and Alan Dater. It documents Maathai’s struggle with the government of President Daniel Arap Moi, the long-lasting ruler who dominated the half-century following Kenya’s independence from Great Britain.
It could be said that the indigenous people of Kenya fared better under the British Empire than did their counterparts in North America. The Kenyan people weren’t removed and replaced by Europeans as were the Indian nations that lived here. But the imposition of the Englishman’s interest in taming wild country and making it pastoral, followed with a vengeance by Moi, who continued clearing hillsides and bottomlands for coffee and tea plantations, had the same effect on the ecosystem. Denuded of trees, the land no longer absorbed water that would later be released, gently and steadily. The land conversion precipitated a time of widespread erosion and unpredictable cycles of low flows and flooding.
Don’t worry that my celebrating this Kenyan dynamo’s work is a prelude to an announcement that Northern Woodlands is going global – quite the opposite. The Northeast is our home, and its forests our mission. If Northern Woodlands were to lead a movement, it wouldn’t be to plant trees – we already have our forests back. Nor would it be to bring down a heedless government. But our movement has similarities to Maathai’s, because our goal is to have both healthy forests and thriving rural communities. Our forests, impoverished in comparison to what our ancestors found here centuries ago, are arguably in their best condition since they began growing back. Our inherited forest offers plenty to work with, and we’re not starting over as they have been in Kenya.
Our challenge is to work with the land, taking from it what it offers, while being sure to nurture the conditions conducive to keeping the ecosystem working. We’ve made progress, but we need to learn even more about working lightly on the land, strengthening the whole system of trees and water, plants and animals, even as we harvest some of its parts.
There are noble people working with forests today. Some are conservationists, striving to make sure that we keep a working land base to provide the wood and food we need. Some are working on restoring river systems so they can recover from our attempts to engineer them and function more in accord with natural processes. And some are mill owners, faced with a daunting business climate but still committed to keeping their doors open and their workers employed in the belief that someday the forest-based economy will once again feed its communities.
These people are deeply connected to the land. Working on their own, their efforts complement those of many others, and the cumulative effect of all these deeply committed people can’t help but be a forest that lives for all of us. Our work at Northern Woodlands is to demonstrate to society that the ecological health of our land and the strength of the economy and the community are as inextricably intertwined as the roots of forest trees.