The Legacy Of Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai

By Jacob Scherr

I awoke today to the sad news that Wangari Maathai, environmental leader and Nobel Prize winner, had died at age 71.   I first had contact with her in the days running up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro almost 20 years ago.  I was finishing up an unprecedented report with Human Rights Watch entitled Defending the Earth: Abuses of Human Rights and the Environment.  

We had gathered case studies of the harassment and suppression of environmental advocates around the world.  The most compelling of them was Wangari’s confrontation with the Kenyan government over plans to build an office building in Uhuru Park in Nairobi.  She was labeled a “subversive”, arrested and jailed, and then along with other protesters gassed and clubbed by the police.  We had invited Wangari to join us at a press conference to release ­Defending the Earth at the June 1992 Earth Summit, but were uncertain whether she would be permitted to leave the Kenya where she had been scheduled to go on trial just days before the start of the Rio Summit.

She was finally permitted to travel to Brazil.   As she spoke at the press event for our report, I was so impressed by her quiet dignity and  immense courage.  She was not afraid to speak out about her own struggle with the Kenyan Government – although not at all sure what would happen to her when she returned home.   She did not hesitate for a moment to link her plight to environmental advocates from other nations whose rights were also being abused.

Over the next two decades, Wangari became a spokesperson not only for environmentalists in Kenya, but for all of us who are working to protect and preserve the Earth.  In her 2004 Nobel Prize Lecture, Wangari said:

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.

That time is now.

It is disappointing that Wangari will not be with us at the next Earth Summit also to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, but I hope her words and actions will continue to inspire and motivate us.  The work we did together in Rio twenty years ago to build cooperation between environmental and human rights groups continues to be as important as ever, and I blogged last June about Returning to Rio to Protect and Empower Environmental Advocates.  Finally I could not agree more as we approach Rio+20 that the time is now to answer Wangari’s call for new ways of thinking to address our planetary challenges and to give real hope to each other for a sustainable future.

[Photo by Global Crop Diversity Trust]

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