Not surprisingly, the women were incredibly resourceful. They used the technology they had available and they used it well. Sometimes they laid their seedbeds on the ground and sometimes they filled broken pots with soil and placed them in a high spot out of reach of their chickens and goats, who might eat the growing trees. The women also used old pots or cans with holes punched in them to water their seedlings. I encouraged this innovation and constantly asked them to think of new ways to do things and not wait for some "official assessment" to take place.
We also gave the women an incentive. "Whenever a seedling that you have raised is planted," I told them, "the movement will compensate you." This was a small amount—the equivalent then of four U.S. cents a tree—but it provided a lot of motivation. After all, these were poor women who, even though they were working all the time—tending crops and livestock, gathering firewood, carrying water, cooking, taking care of their children—had few options for paid employment.
To help the women progress in a way they could handle, we developed a procedure with ten steps, from forming a group, locating a site for a tree nursery, and reporting on their progress to planting trees and following up to make sure they survived. "Do the first step," I said. "If you do the first step and you succeed, let us know. Then move to the second step and the third. By the time you get to the tenth step we'll bring you your money. You'll have done a good job.
After the women had planted seedlings on their own farms, I suggested that 45 they go to surrounding areas and convince others to plant trees. This was a breakthrough, because it was now communities empowering one another for their own needs and benefit. In this way, step by step, the process replicated itself several thousand times. As women and communities increased their efforts, we encouraged them to plant seedlings in rows of at least a thousand trees to form green "belts" that would restore to the earth its cloth of green. This is how the name Green Belt Movement began to be used. Not only did the "belts" hold the soil in place and provide shade and windbreaks but they also re-created habitat and enhanced the beauty of the landscape.
Although I was a highly educated woman, it did not seem odd to me to be working with my hands, often with my knees on the ground, alongside rural women. Some politicians and others in the 1980s and 1990s ridiculed me for doing so. But I had no problem with it, and the rural women both accepted and appreciated that I was working with them to improve their lives and the environment. After all, I was a child of the same soil.
Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from the land, but instill in them even more respect for it, because educated people are in a position to understand what is being lost. The future of the planet concerns all of us, and all of us should do what we can to protect it. As I told the foresters, and the women, you don't need a diploma to plant a tree.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
What is the first symptom of environmental degradation that Maathai notices? What effects does she attribute to this form of degradation?
How are deforestation, soil erosion, malnutrition in cattle, lack of clean water, and malnutrition in children all related to each other? How can planting trees alleviate these problems?
What has been the effect on the Kenyan population of farmers replacing food crops with "cash crops"—like coffee—that can be sold on the international market?
What does Maathai say happens when families do not have access to wood from local sources?
Why does Maathai believe that the women of the Green Belt Movement need to create their own nurseries and gather their own seeds instead of using available resources?
What kinds of knowledge do the women of Kenya bring to the Green Belt Movement? How does their knowledge compare to those who are experts in forestry?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Discuss the connections that Maathai sees between various environmental factors in terms of Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology (p. 344).
How does Maathai compare the kinds of knowledge that women gain in their own gardens with the kind that foresters receive in their formal schooling? How does this compare to the two kinds of knowledge that Richard Feynman discusses in "O Americano Outra Vez" (p. 53)?
Compare and contrast Wangari Maathai, Aung San Suu Kyi (p. 442), and Vandana Shiva (p. 374) as political activists. How are their principles or philosophies similar? How are they different?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Use the effects of deforestation that Wangari Maathai describes as the basis for a discussion of the ecological consequences of isolated actions. Use the readings by Carson (p. 328), Commoner (p. 344), and Shiva (p. 374) as further evidence for your argument.
Compare the kinds of knowledge that the women of the Green Belt Movement hold with those of the professional foresters.
Compare the philosophies of Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement and Vandana Shiva's Navdanya movement. How are the two movements similar? How are they different?
vandana shiva
from Soil, Not Oil
[2008]
DR. VANDANA SHIVA was born in India in 1952. She holds an M.A. in the history of science from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Western Ontario. Shiva is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (RFSTE) in Uttar Pradesh, a province in northern India. This, in turn, led to the creation of Navdanya ("nine crops" and "new gift"), a group that promotes organic farming, establishes seed banks, and lobbies against genetically modified foods.
Shiva has become one of the world's most well-known ecologists. She has written more than twenty books and lectured around the world on topics such as food security, globalization, biodiversity, sustainability, and women's rights. She has also served as a policy advisor to national and local governments in India, Italy, Spain, and Bhutan and has won dozens of awards for her writing, speaking, and activism. In 2003, Time magazine named her an "Environmental Hero."
The reading excerpted here comes from Shiva's 2008 book Soil, Not Oiclass="underline" Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. In it, she argues that current levels of fossil fuel consumption are both unsustainable and ecologically destructive, since there is not enough available energy on Earth for all people to consume it at the rate of the wealthiest countries. To create sustainable communities, the world needs to shift from an "industrial paradigm," which defines progress as moving more and more people to a high-level consumption of fossil-based carbon, to a "biodiversity paradigm" which meets energy needs with renewable, plant-based carbon.
Necessarily, this kind of paradigm shift will mean a world in which people travel less, work differently, and eat different kinds of foods. As Shiva points out, however, many people in the world already live and work close to home and eat food that they grow themselves. Rather than trying to push these communities into an industrial paradigm, industrialized nations should work to protect these communities' ways of life, learn from them, and emulate their consumption patterns.
Much of Shiva's rhetorical power comes from the way that she defines familiar terms in new ways. In this reading she encourages readers to think of the terms "equity" and "democracy" not merely in the context of human relationships, but as applicable as well to how we treat the earth itself and the generations of people who have yet to be born.
The climate crisis is at its roots a consequence of human beings having gone astray from the ecological path of living with justice and sustainability. It is a consequence of forgetting that we are earth citizens. It is acting like we are kids in a supermarket