Wangari Maathai - Bio

Few environmentalists today are worried about the welfare of bees, butterflies and trees alone. They know that it is not possible to keep the environment pure if you have a government that does not control polluting industries and deforestation. In Kenya, for example, real estate developers have been allowed to go into the middle of indigenous forests and build expensive houses. As concerned individuals we should oppose that. When you start intervening at that level, you find yourself in direct confrontation with policy-makers and you start to be called an activist. I was teaching at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s, when I felt that the academic rights of women professors were not being respected because they were women. I became an activist at the university, insisting that I wanted my rights as an academic. Meanwhile, I found myself confronted by other issues that were directly related to my work but were not clear to me at the outset, like human rights. This directly led me to another area, governance.

I realized in the 1970s that in a young democracy like ours it was very easy for leaders to become dictators. As this happened they started using national resources as though they were their personal property. I realized that the constitution had given them powers to misuse official machinery.

So I became involved in the pro-democracy movement and pressed for constitutional reforms and political space to ensure freedom of thought and expression. We cannot live with a political system that kills creativity.