she sought to clarify, saying, “I have . . . been shocked by the ongoing debate generated by what I am purported to have said. It is therefore critical for me to state that I neither say nor believe that the virus was developed by white people or white powers in order to destroy the African people. Such views are wicked and destructive.” Her statements failed to put this controversy to bed successfully, and it continues to plague her legacy.
After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, while she remained active in her roles within Kenya, Maathai also took on prominence and responsibilities that were more regional and global in nature, as chronicled in appendix 1. In 2006, she collaborated with sister laureates Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Betty Williams, and Mairead Maguire to start the Nobel Women Initiative, with the aim of promoting peace and equity. The laureates consolidated their experiences and vast influential platforms to bring attention to challenges of grassroots women across the world as well as to support their work and promote various initiatives and movements.
In 2007, Maathai lost her bid to return to parliament and continued to work as an ambassador for human rights, women’s rights, democracy, and environmental protection globally. During the postelection violence in 2007–8, she joined mediation teams to promote unity and peace through restorative justice approaches, as she had done after the 2002 elections. She maintained her work with the GBM, which established new initiatives, including the Women and Girls project. To crown it all, in 2010, she helped establish the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies (WMI),1 housed at the same veterinary campus at the University of Nairobi where she had lost her job (S. G. Kiama,2 personal communication with author, July 11, 2018). The establishment of this institution, which grants master’s and doctoral degrees, represented a full-circle return of Maathai the scholar, with her academic and activist ideals and ideas infused into the development of an entire academic institution. She served as WMI’s founding distinguished chair, a position she held until she passed away on September 25, 2011, at the age of seventy-one, following a battle with ovarian cancer.
Wangari Muta Maathai was mourned globally. To honor her commitment to environmental protection, “her remains were placed in a bamboo-frame coffin made of water hyacinth and papyrus reeds. She was cremated, and her remains were interred in the compound of the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies” (Dalby 2011).
This chapter has explored the roots of Maathai’s individualities related to environmental development and management, women’s rights, human rights, democratic politics, and international relations as developed out of interactions with particular personal, Kenyan, and global histories. These identities are numerous and complex. As a scholar and academic leader, this first female PhD in East and Central Africa (and awardee of over fifteen honorary doctorates) was a scientist, researcher, professor, author of books, public intellectual, department chair, and distinguished academic chair. As an activist, she was an environmental conservationist, a human rights defender, an advocate for peace, a UN messenger of peace, a global feminist, a board member for various organizations, a philanthropist, and a goodwill ambassador. As a politician, she was a presidential candidate, a political party leader, an assistant minister, an MP, an activist for democracy, and a thorn in the side of the oppressive Kenyan government as well as global governance bodies. Her thoughts and philosophies that emerged from these interfacing identities, roles, and histories, and which epitomize her ideas and ideals, are explored in the chapters that follow.
2
Replenishing the Earth
Maathai’s Holistic Environmentalism
This chapter focuses on Wangari Maathai’s critical thoughts and philosophies on the subject of environmental conservation, articulated in Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (2010) and The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2003) as well as her lectures, speeches, articles, interviews, and activist exercises. I abstract from these a conceptualization of holistic environmentalism that offers a path to sustainable environmental (re)production, protection, and justice, which serves as a path to other forms of social justice. Maathai’s critical ideas analyzed in the four sections of this chapter exemplify her trademark holistic environmentalism that is rooted in radical utu. The first and second sections systemize what she considered the necessary jumping-off point for any efforts at environmental defense work: an understanding of and appreciation for the state of the environment. As she reasoned, “The immediate response to the crisis is the rainfall has not come. ‘The rains did not come.’ But very few of us ask, ‘Why didn’t the rains come?’ That’s the challenge. We need to ask ourselves, and that’s why we’re being challenged to think holistically” (Maathai 2005b). Maathai suggested that the practice of holistic environmentalism requires approaches based on a comprehensive understanding of specific environments, and this demands a shift in outlooks and approaches in the study of ecologies. In the first section, I cover the lenses and perspectives she proposed for reading environments and the entities and interactions within those environments. These perspectives would be incomplete without historicizing localized states of environments, as I demonstrate in the second section, using Maathai’s analysis of Kenya’s environmental history.
Proficiency and familiarity with the state of the environment informs the development of critical approaches for investigating environmental issues and environmentalism as well as appropriate and effective models for practical conservationism. In sections three and four, I present the processes that follow the acquisition of the insights identified above—that is, the definition of environmentalist knowledge construction and activist models. The principles articulated in Maathai’s work and delineated in these sections endorse the designing of approaches for environmentalism, which serve both the physical world and the human beings residing in it. Apposite and well-directed conservationism, for Maathai, was difficult to achieve without clear foundational values and ideals. The frameworks that emerge from this examination of her work and words center the ideal that environmental management exists in synergetic relationships with other processes and realities, including peace, security, health, capacity building, and poverty reduction. It is through this filter that she conceptualized conservation, environmental justice, and ecological security not only as bound to but also as a route to ensuring other types of security, including food, human, and national.
Translation of these ideas and ideals into active radical environmentalism is made possible by the processes and frameworks described. Maathai named environmental protection and replenishing as political acts, conceptualizing the act of planting trees as a symbol of defiance (Maathai 2006). Teasing out this idea, I complete the chapter by focalizing applications of Maathai’s critical thoughts and values toward activating what I call utu-driven eco-revolutions.
Utu and Cognizing Environments
Desmond Tutu deciphers, “Africa is the birthplace of ubuntu, the ancient spirituality of humanity, oneness with our creator, the other, and nature. Together with humanity’s team, I dream of a new world and a new humanity—a humanity that expresses ubuntu. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—I am because we are. We are all one” (2012). Per this definition, the human condition and the condition of being human are intimately connected to humans’ relationship with their environment. Maathai’s holistic environmentalism is inseparable from utu. She said, “Human beings have a consciousness by which we can appreciate love, beauty, creativity, and innovation or mourn the lack thereof. To the extent that we can go beyond ourselves and ordinary biological instincts, we experience what it means to be human and therefore different from other forms of life” (Maathai 2010a, 17). Maathai offered a deeper environmental dimension to the beingness of the human, arguing, “In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves and all humankind” (17). To wit, we lose some of our humanity, with damage happening at physical, psychological, and spiritual levels when our environment is mutilated. This stresses the
