Wangari Maathai

Some people, by their nature, ignore the status quo and ignore the

odds, and go where no one has gone before. They are peaceful but

courageous warriors.

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Wangari Maathai was the first woman to do a lot of things: she was the first woman from
East Africa to earn a PhD, the first woman to head up a department at the University of
Nairobi, and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
As a girl in a poor country, Wangari had to work against the odds to achieve these things,
but she was never the kind of person to let high odds hold her back. By the mid-1970s,
Wangari Maathai was a professor of anatomy, head of the Kenyan Red Cross, and
involved in a number of charities and causes. But she was about to get a great idea....
Dr. Maathai could see that Kenya had two major problems - its natural environment was
in bad shape, mostly due to too many trees being cut down, and there were so few jobs
that many families were struggling or even starving.
Her idea was simple but brilliant: solve both problems at once by hiring unemployed
people to plant more trees! This straightforward plan grew into a whole campaign to
teach the people of Kenya to understand and respect the environment and each other. She
called it the Green Belt Movement.
Although she went through a lot of hard times and struggled with opposition from the
Kenyan government, Wangari Maathai managed to keep the Green Belt Movement alive.
Then, in 1985, the United Nations held an environmental conference in Kenya, and