write an imaginary interview with wangari maathai who started the green belt movement
Answers
Answer:
INTERVIEW WITH MARIANNE SCHNALL (12/9/08)
UPDATE 9/26/11 -- Editor's Note: Wangari Maathai died on Sunday, September 25, 2011, at age 71, after a long battle with cancer. According to the Associated Press, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga said her death "strikes at the core of our nation's heart."
Marianne Schnall: There are so many issues affecting Africa and our world, what was your pathway to the environment becoming your cause?
Wangari Maathai: Well, I think my understanding was very basic because I started with ordinary women from the countryside expressing their very basic needs for water, for food, for firewood, and for income, and then realizing that what the women were describing was an environment – they were coming from an environment that was failing to sustain them. And so looking at that environment and especially because I had grown up in the same environment, I realized that there are very serious activities such as deforestation, loss of the soil that was gradually destroying that environment and impoverishing them. And so that actually became my entry point. And I suggested that we plant trees and they agreed and we started, but as we did plant those trees, it almost became like a school for me to understand that what the women were describing were symptoms, and that it was necessary for us to go to the cause. And that cause became sometimes physical destruction of the environment, and then the question was by whom, and that led me into issues of irresponsible management of resources by government. So one thing just led to the other and eventually I got a much better understanding of how the environment is destroyed and how it could be restored.
MS: As the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, how do you see the connection between the environment and peace, in that region, and in the world?
WM: For me, as I say, as I got deeper and deeper into the issues, I came to realize that so often when we use the resources, first and foremost there is that degradation of the environment, as I was seeing in my own country. And I noticed that when resources degrade, there is less of them. And especially land, which is one natural resource that most people in the world want to access – or resources such as water, which we all need. When these resources are degraded or polluted, then there are fewer of them for the rest of us, and then we start competing for them and eventually as we compete, there are those of us, who have the capacity, who have the ability to be the controllers, to decide who accesses them, how much they access, and eventually there is a conflict. Those who feel marginalized, those who feel excluded, eventually react in an effort to get their own justice, and we have conflict.
So it became very clear to me that whether it is at the local level in Kenya, where we had tribal clashes over land and water, or whether it is at the global level, where we are fighting over water, over oil, over minerals – that a lot of the conflicts we have in the world are actually due to competition over resources. And that’s how I saw that one way in which we can promote peace, is by promoting sustainable management of our resources, equitable distribution of these resources, and that the only way you can actually do that, is that then you have to have a political, economic system that facilitates that. And then you get into the issues of human rights, justice, economic justice, social justice, and good governance or democratic governance. That’s how it ties up, and I was very happy when the Norwegian Nobel Committee saw what I was trying to do.
Please Mark as Brainlst Answer.
imaging interview wangari maatho