Opponent of Deforestation wins Nobel Peace Prize

October 10, 2004

Deforestation is one of the problems of great concern to me; it is a residual effect of imperialism, since most deforestation crisis-zones are the result of logging and cash crops being introduced by colonial powers, Typically it is propagated after the colonial power leaves, by urban populations against the remaining indigenous rural peasants or bush farmers. In countries like Brazil or China, this seems like a gratuitous blaming of Western powers, since Brazil won independence from Portugal in 1822 and the Chinese Republic liquidated most of the foreign enclaves by 1924. But in those cases, imperialism continued to exist internally; the urbanized elites of the Latin American countries continued to have a predatory relationship toward the peasant farmers, and this persists today.

So it is quite meaningful that Wangari Maathai (Kenya) has won this year's Nobel Prize for peace (Wikipedia).

Press Release: Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement—a grass-roots environmental lobby—in 1977, which planted 12 million trees across the country to prevent soil erosion. Since then, she has been increasingly active on both environmental and women's issues.

Maathai was also the former chairperson of Maendeleo Ya Wanawake (the National Council of Women of Kenya). In the 1980s her husband divorced her, saying she was too strong-minded for a woman.

In 1997, in Kenya's second multi-party elections marred by ethnic violence, she ran for president of Kenya, but her party withdrew her candidacy. Under the regime of President Daniel Arap Moi, she was imprisoned several times and violently attacked for demanding multi-party elections and an end to corruption and tribal politics. She almost single-handedly won the fight to save Nairobi's Uhuru Park by stopping the construction of a giant 60-storey Kenya Times Media Trust business complex by Moi's business associates. Maathai was elected to parliament in 2002 when Mwai Kibaki defeated Uhuru Kenyatta. She has been Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife since 2003. She founded the Mazingira Green Party of Kenya in 2003.