Word: maathai
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...WANGARI MAATHAI...
...road, halted at the edge of the forest and disgorged 28 passengers--all of them old women. Then came a pickup truck carrying their weapons--not clubs or rifles but gardening tools and watering cans. Finally a small car pulled up, and out strode their leader, Wangari Maathai, an imposing 5-ft. 8-in. woman in a long blue dress and a red-and-black polka-dot head scarf. She picked up a pot containing a 2-ft. Meru oak seedling, but the police refused to let her carry it into the forest. In a soft but determined voice...
Only a strong person would defy the iron regime of Kenya's President Moi, and Maathai, 58, fits the bill. An anatomy professor at the University of Nairobi and the first Kenyan woman to receive a Ph.D., she founded the women's Green Belt Movement, which has planted 7 million trees in Kenya and inspired similar efforts around the globe. In 1989 her protests forced Moi to abandon a personal plan to erect a 62-story office tower in a Nairobi park. And in 1991 her activism became a political force when she helped start an opposition group called...
This time, though, she may have gone too far. No one is saying whether Maathai encouraged the burning of the bulldozers or overzealous followers acted on their own initiative. She claims that thugs were hired to beat up members of her movement and then destroyed the machinery in a fit of anger when they were not paid what they were promised...
...winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize last year, Maathai interweaves her new political activities with her old fight to preserve Kenya's land. Her opposition to a plan by the ruling party and the late Robert Maxwell to build a 62-story office building on the site of Nairobi's Uhuru Park frightened away other foreign investors and scuttled the project. She also led the outcry against destruction of 20 hectares (50 acres) of forest on Nairobi's outskirts so that roses could be grown for export. Maathai countered official claims that the site contained no indigenous trees with...