Word: wangari
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rattled up the 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...
...Kenya's leading environmentalist, Wangari Maathai has been honored as a hero and denounced as a subversive. Maathai, 51, is the founder and director of the Green Belt Movement, a 14-year-old tree-planting project staffed primarily by women. The internationally acclaimed movement, which has spread to a dozen African nations, has planted 10 million trees. The goal: to counter rampant tree clearing and the advance of the African desert, which contribute to poverty and hunger. To date, 50,000 Kenyan women have worked in 1,500 GBM nurseries, earning 4 cents for each tree they tend; funds come...
...Wangari Maathai took on a formidable mission: holding back Kenya's advancing desert. Rampant tree cutting and unchecked population growth have stripped much of the country's land, generating hunger and poverty. In response, Maathai organized the Green Belt Movement, a national tree-planting program run by women. "Because women here are responsible for their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve," explains Maathai, 49, who was the first Kenyan woman to earn a Ph.D. (in anatomy) and the first to become a professor at the University of Nairobi...