I Will Be A Hummingbird, I Will Do The Best I Can
By: Kate McIntosh
It is no longer possible to discuss environmental change without addressing social change; moveover, it is not possible to address women’s oppression with addressing environmental degradation.
-Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen
In 1977 Wangari Maathai planted seven trees in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. Though five of them died, two survived, and would become the first shoots of the Green Belt Movement, an environmental organization which has planted over 51 million trees throughout Kenya (“Tree Planting and Water Harvesting”). As for Maathai’s agency and activism, her unhindered passion and tenacity, these are qualities that she emanated long before the movement began. In 1971 she became the first woman in Eastern Africa to earn a Ph.D., which landed her a job at the University of Nairobi as one of the first female professors. More recently, in 2004, she became the first African woman to earn the Nobel Peace Prize. Her work is situated at the intersection of environmental justice and women’s empowerment, and though she has been beaten, jailed, and threatened with assassination by her own government, she has only grown taller and broadened the scope of her activism in a fight for global justice.
As Audre Lorde states in her essay There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions, “I know I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only,” Wangari Maathai could not ultimately deny the intersectionality of her work (Lorde). In an interview with Krista Tippett, Maathai explains that she “accidentally… became an activist for human rights issues, for women rights issues,” and that had she not been studying in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement, she wouldn’t have incorporated social justice issues so effortlessly into her work. When she listened to the stories of rural Kenyan women she also began to see the connection between environmental activism and social justice. "They were asking for water. They were asking for food, nutritious food. They were asking for energy, which was mainly firewood. And they were saying they have no income" (Tippett).
Because women, especially in developing countries, are more likely to collect water, food, and firewood, they are often the first to suffer changes in the environment (Tugend). In 1993, the year that Gaard and Green published their essay, African women performed 60 percent of agricultural work in their countries, and 60 to 80 percent of the food production. Globally, women produced 80 percent of the world’s food supplies, which consequently put them at a higher risk to pollution, deforestation, soil erosion, and extraction (Gaard). Furthermore, governments in developing nations, on average, devoted less than 10 percent of their budgets to sustainable agriculture, and instead placed much more value on cash crops.
Many ecofeminists contend that women and nature experience similar forms of domination, objectification, and devaluation. There exists no method to account “for nature’s own production or destruction until the products of nature enter the cash economy, nor does it account for the majority of work done by women” (Gaard). Trees, which protect soil from erosion, provide firewood for women, and are essential to the health of forest ecosystems, are often undervalued until they are harvested, sold, and integrated into the economy. Similar to the ways in which nature doesn’t ‘count’ in the international market economy, work relegated to women such as carrying water, collecting firewood, weeding and hoeing, bearing children, and preparing food is not factored into their economic productivity, and they are not compensated for it. As Maathai states, “it is true that women are still a very unappreciated resource in many societies. I can see how quickly women, even very competent women, are sacrificed on the altar of political convenience” (Tippett).
It is impossible to put a value on the work that Maathai and thousands of other women and men have done through the Green Belt Movement. There are now over 6,000 tree nurseries throughout Kenya, and though Maathai passed away in 2011, she has left thousands of people to continue the work. Perhaps one of the greatest legacies that Maathai left behind was her belief in education. At the time, planting a single tree was a quite radical act--one that Maathai and others were beaten for--but Maathai took conservation and sustainability past the realm of ecology and into the homes of the Kenyan communities. As she explains, “the important thing for me was to see the linkage, and that’s what I try to encourage people to do. If you’re going to do anything for the environment, you have to see what has been disconnected” (Tippett).
In this modern day, what is disconnected from the environment is us, and every organism on the planet is paying a heavy price for this severance. Maathai not only taught women and men to plant and nurture trees, she taught them about their interdependence with the environment; because their fates were intertwined with the land, every action to preserve and protect their environment would also safeguard their livelihoods. Furthermore, she believed that the ultimate reason for protecting the environment came from a moral responsibility to be stewards of this earth. (Tippett). Like the hummingbird in her parables, who made trip after trip to throw a droplet of water on a forest fire, Maathai never gave up, and she inspired millions to do the same in the name of gender equality, environmental justice, and democracy.
P.S. Sorry Bernel! I didn't realize you also did a piece on Wangari Maathai a while back.
Works Cited
Gaard, Greta, and Lori Gruen. “Ecofeminism: Toward Global Justice and Planetary Health.”
Society and Nature, vol. 2, 1993, pp. 1–35.,
www.scribd.com/doc/247842742/Ecofeminism-Toward-Global-Justice-and-Planetary-Health. Accessed 29 Apr. 2018.
Lorde, Audre, and Rudolph P. Byrd. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of
Audre Lorde. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Tippett, Krista. "Wangari Maathai: Planting the Future." On Being. Krista Tippett Public
Productions, 29 Sept. 2011.
"Tree Planting and Water Harvesting." The Green Belt Movement. N.p., n.d.
www.greenbeltmovement.org/what-we-do/tree-planting-for-watersheds. Accessed 29
Apr. 2018.
Tugend, Alina. “Women's Crucial Role in Combating Climate Change.” The New York Times, 1
climate-change.html. Accessed 29 Apr. 2018.
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