We turn now to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Kenyan environmentalist, lawmaker and civil society activist, Wangari Maathai. Her latest book, The Challenge for Africa, tackles the broad obstacles to living in peace, justice, environmental and economic security for the one billion people across the continent of Africa.
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AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, first, how you became an environmentalist, what first sparked you, the Green Belt Movement, and then taking that large to all of Africa, what you’re doing today?
WANGARI MAATHAI: Well, anybody who sees the film that will be showing next week on PBS called Taking Root and then reads this book, The Challenge for Africa, will see how I started, first and foremost, as a project for the National Council of Women, responding to the basic needs of women from the countryside and who were members of the National Council of Women; and how that led me into a tree-planting campaign, encouraging women to form groups; and how that led me into governance issues, when I saw that when you have a non-democratic, a non-accountable, a non-caring, a greedy government, that it is very easy to destroy the environment and to destroy the livelihoods of the very people you are leading, and then I started advocating for basic human rights; and then how that led me to deciding that maybe I should become a legislator myself; and how, in the course of all those thirty years, I have come to realize that what we need is a very holistic approach to Africans’ issues and that we need to understand that it is not one track, that there are many issues that need to be approached simultaneously, as we have tried to do in the Green Belt Movement.
AMY GOODMAN: You have written about—in Time magazine, you had an article last month—in the Los Angeles Times, rather—“Where Are Africa’s Obamas?” What do you mean?
WANGARI MAATHAI: What I was reflecting on is the fact that the Obama phenomenon is such an inspiring story in Africa, and young people and leaders in Africa are talking about Obama, are enthusiastic about Obama, are looking up to Obama, and yet they are not creating in Africa an environment, a peaceful environment, a democratic environment, a conducive environment for the little Obamas in Africa to realize their potential, because, after all, there are so many young people who were born at the same time that Obama was born.
And the challenge I was putting to the African leadership is, if this young man had grown up in this region, would he have been able to exploit his potential the way he has been able to do it in the United States of America? Does one have to go to the United States of America to experience their potential? So, in a way, I was putting a challenge to ourselves to create the kind of conducive environment where our children can experience their full potential.
AMY GOODMAN: Wangari Maathai, you have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and I was wondering about your response to President Obama escalating the war in Afghanistan. Though he did initially oppose the war in Iraq, he’s taken a different approach with Afghanistan.
WANGARI MAATHAI: Well, quite obviously, it’s always very easy to criticize from a distance and especially without the insight and the inside story. And we would want to see the war end, but we also know that the world is not as peaceful as we would want it to be. So I’m really hoping that with his commitment to end the war, that he will do whatever it takes to ensure that we have peace.