io SECTION -C: CREATIVE WRITING (TEXTUAL) You have read the lesson 'Environment. In that lesson Wangart Maathai sed the foresters to come and teach the illiterate women how to plant tree Now, write an imaginary conversation between Wangari Maathal and the rester in the given context,
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BY MIA MACDONALD
8 MIN READ
MAR 26, 2005
Wangari Maathai has always had an affinity for trees. As a child, she learned from her grandmother that a large fig tree near her family home in central Kenya was sacred and not to be disturbed. She gathered water for her mother at springs protected by the roots of trees. In the mid-1970s, Maathai, in an effort to meet the basic needs of rural women, began to plant trees with them. Her non-governmental Green Belt Movement has planted 30 million trees across Kenya, many of which still stand. In 2004 her work was internationally recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize.
“As trees grow, they give you hope and self-confidence,” Maathai said recently. “You feel good, like you have transformed the landscape.” So it should come as no surprise that within an hour of learning she had won the peace prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace, Maathai planted a tree. It was a nandi flame tree native to her home region of Nyeri, Kenya, where Maathai was when she heard the news. Never one to stand on ceremony, she knelt on the earth and dug her hands into the red soil, warm from the sun, and settled the tree into the ground. It was, she told the journalists and onlookers gathered, “the best way to celebrate.”
I was with Maathai that day. Rubbing the dirt from her hands, she took the occasion to turn her message to the world: “Honor this moment by planting trees,” she said as the media jammed her cell phone. “I’m sure millions of trees would be planted if every friend of the environment, and especially of me, did.”
Putting the pieces together
It was in the mid-1970s that Maathai became aware of Kenya’s ecological decline: watersheds drying up, streams disappearing, and the desert expanding south from the Sahara. On visits to Nyeri she found streams she had known as a child gone—dried up. Vast forests had been cleared for farms or plantations of fast-growing exotic trees that drained the ecosystem of water and degraded the soil.
Maathai began making connections others hadn’t. “Listening to the women talk about water, about energy, about nutrition, it all boiled down to the environment,” she told me recently. “I came to understand the linkage between environmental degradation and the felt needs of the communities.”
She hit on the idea of using trees to replenish the soil, provide fuel wood, protect watersheds and promote better nutrition (through growing fruit trees). “If you understand and you are disturbed, then you are moved to action,” she says. “That’s exactly what happened to me.”
Maathai set up a tree nursery in Karura Forest on the outskirts of Nairobi, later shifting it to her backyard. But the idea did not catch fire. In her book, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience, Maathai recounts bringing seedlings to the annual agricultural show in Nairobi in 1975. A number of people expressed interest in tree planting. Not one, though, followed up.
Disappointed, but not deterred, the National Council of Women of Kenya urged her to pursue the idea and in 1977, the Green Belt Movement was born. Planting trees seemed “reasonable, doable,” she says. But government foresters initially resisted. They didn’t believe uneducated rural women could plant and tend trees.