The earth has lost a very, very good friend: Dr. Wangari Maathai. She was a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, environmental activist, human rights campaigner, and a wonderful voice for reason in the face of the madness we so often do to our planet and ourselves. She died this week at the age of 71 from ovarian cancer.
She not only started the influential Green Belt Movement, based in Kenya, but was a driving force behind the UN’s Billion Tree Campaign. She reached across many cultures to inspire and inform people about how to take care of and be with the earth. She was, herself, and thankfully for us, a force of nature. Her story has been beautifully told in the film Taking Root and in her books.
In her Nobel Peace Prize lecture in December of 2004, she reminded us that:
Activities that devastate the environment and societies continue unabated. 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.
(See video highlights of her speech here.)
She had a featured role in the superb documentary Dirt! The Movie. In the movie, she tells the story of the hummingbird who fights a forest fire, drop by drop. Dirt!’s co-director and producer, Gene Rosow, had this to say in his tribute to her: “Like the wings of the hummingbird, Wangari Maathai’s heart still beats in our efforts to bring about the just and sustainable world she envisioned.”
