to manage it justly and sustainably and also so they can fully access their own humanness. Meeting this task requires changes in attitudes and perspectives in time and space as well as thought. This should be reflected in how we relate to the environment, paying simultaneous attention to the longer view, the broader picture, and the small details and entities (Maathai 2010a, 67). She wrote, “The task for us in healing the Earth’s wounds is to find a balance between the vertical and horizontal views; the big picture and the small; between knowledge based on measurement and data, and knowledge that draws on older forms of wisdom and experience” (76). The knowledge acquired through balancing multiple perspectives will inform the definition of holistic approaches.
To fully master this relationship to the environment requires contextualized analysis of the root causes of existing environmental conditions, which helps human beings learn from their pasts in designing futures. In the next section, I engage with Maathai’s analysis of Kenya’s environmental history to illustrate this idea. This history also offers further insight into how mismanaging the environment degrades humanity and humanness for both the destroyers and those affected by the destruction.
Denaturing the Environment: The Case of Kenya
For Maathai, environmental degradation and its effects on the continent of Africa were merely the symptoms of something more substantial, and so any real remedy required a consideration of the root causes. Growing into adulthood, she observed the depletion of the lush greenery and streams of her childhood days and later, as a scientist, understood this as a function of human interference (Maathai 2006). In response, Maathai promoted the idea of focusing on the triggers of disempowerment, poverty, lack of water, failing food security, poor health, and general letdowns, among other challenges (Maathai 2007a, 173; Maathai 2009b, 5). As part of this reflection, Maathai placed some responsibility at the feet of the citizens. Largely, however, she recognized that the environmental degradation was caused by external forces (Maathai 2007a, 173), observing that large-scale destruction of forests was not the work of the often-marginalized people who lived near them (Maathai 2010a, 38–55). The impoverished people who lived around forests, marginalized from control of the operations of modernity, were not the ones destroying forests (Maathai 2000, 41). They were just the ones most affected. Maathai pointed a finger at governments and companies as well as individuals such as poachers, conservationists, and tourists, many of them foreigners controlling and profiting from African lands and resources (Maathai 2009b, 229–33).
In Kenya, environmental degradation has affected rain cycles and agricultural and livestock production and caused a lack of basic day-to-day requirements such as food, firewood, and indigenous medicines for many. Kenyans experience consequences of this economically, politically and socially. In explaining why responsiveness to the root causes should inform approaches and philosophies of activism and critical thinking on the subject, Maathai distinguished an always-present connection of the human being to the land. She communicated the importance of sustaining that balance in her lecture “Bottlenecks to Development in Africa,” drawing attention to indigenous African societies where food security was safeguarded at both the family and communal level and relating this to communities’ day-to-day communion with their environments (Maathai 1995a). She spoke of the world of her childhood, where stabilized seasons and sustainable cultures of food production, processing, usage, storage, and distribution steadied food security and good health for not just the people but the physical environment as well. This picture is of an ecosystem in balance, with all the parts of the whole complementing and supporting each other, a reality that is necessary for the social, economic, and physical health and security of communities.
Having experienced this equilibrium, Maathai sought to pinpoint the source of environmental imbalances and related phenomena experienced in contemporary Kenya and indeed the rest of Africa (Maathai 2006). In an interview with Marianne Schnall (Maathai 2009d), she shared her journey, which began with rural women she encountered in her work. As she was confronted by their narratives expressing basic needs, including water, firewood, income, medicine, and food, she realized they were describing the failure of the environment to sustain them. Critically, she recognized these conditions as symptoms of larger systemic and structural root causes. Specifically, she traced their origins to the scourge of colonialism. Highlighting, like other decolonial thinkers, the impact of colonialism, racism, and capitalism, Maathai particularized the effects of this negative side of modernity to the question of the environment (Maathai 2009b, 233–34). To sustainably address the root causes of environment-attendant issues of underdevelopment, she argued, necessitated an interrogation of the exploitation perpetrated mostly by representatives of the Global North and their allies, spaces they plundered for profit and political control, and their culpability and responsibility (Maathai 1995a; Taking Root 2008). This was an exercise she undertook in relation to Kenya.
Out of the profit-obsessed colonial cosmos was born a culture of pillaging the environment without any concern for replenishing it. This happened through a deliberate process. To control the land, it was necessary for the colonialists to estrange the people from it. The capitalist and neoliberal ideologies and exercises of colonialism and, later, neocolonialism separated the people from the land, severing the communion that Maathai saw as essential to the survival of both. The expropriation of native land through the 1902 Crown Lands Ordinance stole from the people a personal stake in the land and erased their direct relationships to specific parcels of ancestral land. They became tenants on their own land, which was now owned by the Crown. Further erasure of ownership occurred when the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance made possible ninety-nine-year leases for settlers (Onyango, Swallow, and Meinzen-Dick 2005, 5; Home 2012, 189–90). The institution of title deeds blatantly appropriated land from rightful owners, even erasing ancestral claims to it (Maathai 2010a, 227), and the creation of native reserves furthered this estrangement. As a consequence of colonialism and this alienation of colonial subjects from their land, a process of dehumanizing was actuated. Along with losing their land, they also experienced a reassignment of identities and ranks in this new societal order, what Maathai outlined as a form of eco-racism (Maathai 2007a).
As Africans lost their relationship to the land and their environment, their homes were destroyed, their land was appropriated, and forests they treasured for spiritual and other reasons were cut down to build residential native reserves (Maathai 2007a, 62; Taking Root 2008). In the reserves, created as a domicile for the displaced Africans, limited access to land and overpopulation resulted in a shortage of food and other resources (Kanyinga 2009, 327; Maathai 2007a, 67). At the same time, people were forced to migrate to find work for their survival, intensifying the disconnection from the land. The introduction of taxes forced native Kenyans to give up subsistence farming to seek wage labor. The human beings’ relationship to the land was now redefined and corrupted by pressing financial needs and responsibilities. First, land was taken away. Second, the symbiotic relationship of care and use between the human and the land was obliterated. Third, the large numbers of people on small pieces of reserve land and departure from practices that had protected the land for centuries exhausted the land’s productivity and quickly fatigued the soil. Fourth, the dehumanizing regulation of the movements of native Kenyans through the kipande identification system (Home 2012, 179) and the control of their labor affected how and where they worked the land (Kanyinga 2009, 328). The demands of colonialism transferred native Kenyans’ time and labor from caring for their land, if they had any, to caring for someone else’s land—the settlers’—in ways in which the settlers instructed. The new systems forced native Kenyans to farm foreign crop varieties and with methods foreign to their experience.
Maathai experienced this impact of colonialism personally. She grew up in a reality where white settlers who constituted less than 1 percent of the population controlled over 20 percent of Kenya’s prime land, the so-called White Highlands. Hundreds of thousands of native Kenyans, including her family, were forced to live as squatters (Maathai 2007a, 62) and registered as resident native laborers, a system that KAU leaders called “new slavery.” In this environment, the colonial-era introduction of a cash economy and cash-crop economies across Africa initiated threats to food security. The colonial administrators instructed against indigenous farming technologies and systems, representing them as inferior.
