ground zero for an emerging new world. The city of Seattle launched one of the first extensive recycling programs in the country; Bastyr, one of the first natural medicine universities was located in Puget Sound, and the region was a national leader in “new age” religion. My friends and I liked to think of ourselves as “post-modern” folks, living with our fingers on the pulse of, well, we weren’t entirely sure, but we knew at the very least that people around the world were awfully interested in what we were saying and doing.
But with this onslaught of creativity came traffic jams and a quickening of the pace of life that felt a little unnatural. It sometimes felt like my fellow urbanites and I were skating on ice not yet hard enough to support us. I remember one evening in 1998 talking with a university colleague about the very risky decisions of several friends we shared to max out multiple credit cards with no real plan to pay them off, as well as buying houses they clearly could not afford.
The two of us came to the conclusion that the American economy was a kind of “vapor,” capable of being clearly seen for what it is from a bit of distance, but which disappears when you’re inside of it. We guessed the economy would roll along recklessly for about ten more years, and then it would encounter some monumental challenges. And with all the extraordinary advances in technology, financial growth, and health care, were we not forgetting some basic, even elemental aspects of our humanity? So many people appeared to be running around like headless chickens, and people’s physical and mental health seemed to be getting collectively worse rather than better.
Trained as a pharmacist in the 1950s, my father loved trying to help family and friends get well and stay well, and I remember many conversations with him about which medicines really could cure pain and suffering. He told me that he and his classmates at the University of Connecticut had been required to study botany, but that later botany had been dropped from the curriculum, and how delighted he was to learn that botany was being taught again to pharmacy students. Plants, he was certain, held many benefits for human health.
There was a small closet in my childhood home that held dozens of samples of pills and potions my father obtained at pharmaceutical conferences and the trade events he attended—although that closet was seldom opened. My sister and I rarely got sick, neither did my parents, and I now understand that a primary reason for our collective good health was my mother’s insistence on serving fresh, homemade Italian meals. She was raised with the belief that “food is medicine,” and that if you ate well, other treatments were rarely needed. Inspired by my now-deceased father, who understood the efficacious qualities of plants, and by my mother’s dedication to creating delicious and healthy food, I realize today that I was nurtured by them and was perfectly poised for the leap into the waters of nature healing that, unbeknownst to me, I was about to undertake.
AFRICA CALLING
I had a phone in my hand and was about to call and cancel my booking with the American travel company that was organizing my journey to Tanzania—the trip that would take me to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, on a wildlife safari, and then to the exotic island of Zanzibar. Lately I had become afraid that I just didn’t have the energy to get myself half way around the world and up a 19,340 foot mountain.
I was not well—on all levels, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. For almost two years, I gradually had been getting sicker. When my father died in 1997, I had failed to truly grieve his loss in my life. Instead, I followed a rather more common American strategy by filling the void I felt with intensive career-focused work, completing my doctoral thesis while working full-time as a consultant for a start-up firm that was capitalizing on Americans’ rising interest in holistic health and wellness.
Imagine the irony: my job was to help companies capitalize on people’s growing fascination with eating and living more healthfully, and in the process I was making myself less and less well. Yet even though I was truly exhausted and about to call and cancel my trip, I ultimately hesitated and put down the phone. I don’t know why.
A few days later, however, the travel company called me, explaining that a large family group had cancelled its booking, meaning that the journey I was scheduled to be part of would have to be cancelled. But the travel consultant wondered whether I would be interested in joining another group, one scheduled to depart for Tanzania a few weeks after the original date of my booking.
I considered: this was my chance to get out of the whole thing and not lose a dime in deposits, because the cancellation wasn’t my fault. But instead of doing exactly that, I astonished myself by merrily announcing, “Sure! No problem, sign me up for the later departure.”
In retrospect, it’s clear: something beyond my rational mind led my exhausted self to the airplane that ferried me to East Africa for the first time. Whatever it was, I am blessed that I can now share the story. It’s a story that goes far beyond the stark headlines of disease, death, conflict, and poverty in Africa. It’s a tale, rather, about life, wellness, co-creation, and riches. I received a second Ph.D. in Tanzania—but this one did not involve reading books or taking classes or writing a dissertation.
Yet it did involve many profound lessons and an array of very difficult tests—trials of the mind as well as of the heart.
PLANTING SEEDS
My African adventure may have begun on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, but the real journey began when I returned to the United States. I arrived back in Seattle in early October 1999, and in more ways than one, I was out of sorts. What a case of poor planning I had done: two days before I’d been sunning on the beach in Zanzibar, and now here I was, waking wrapped up in a down duvet and listening to the rain steadily fall on the roof of my Seattle home.
Dressed in wool and fleece, I headed over to the University of Washington, where I was advising students in the Environmental Studies program. On the way to an appointment, I stopped at the university bookstore, hoping to find some comfort in old, familiar surroundings. I studied a wall of books written by authors scheduled to speak in Seattle in the coming weeks. Every other title seemed to have something to do with “individual freedom,” “self-help,” or “becoming independent.” My sour mood worsened when I thought, “What’s so great about working hard enough to survive completely alone in this world?” Sure, the foundational values of freedom and liberty that are forged into the American psyche are important, but had we gone too far? What were we freeing ourselves from? Was it making us any happier?
Later that day, one of the co-directors of the Environmental Studies program overheard me sharing with a student some of my experiences with wildlife management and traditional communities in Tanzania and he stopped and asked, “Tanya, are you going to listen to Wangari Maathai speak this evening?”
“What? She’s here?” I replied. And the day instantly began to improve.
I had been a big fan of Wangari’s work with women in Kenya for some time. A number of the books I had read on the environmental movement and ways to curb radical climate change mentioned the organization she founded, The Greenbelt Movement. Wangari had left her position as a professor at the University of Nairobi to work at the grassroots, helping to empower women, psychologically and economically, and had brilliantly focused on planting trees as the primary means to do so. (Twenty-seven years and thirty million trees later, Wangari and the Greenbelt Movement would be awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 2004.)
Wangari Maathai and I in Arusha in 2008, three years before she passed away
But in 1999, what in the world was this wonderful woman doing in Seattle? The University of Washington wasn’t known to be
