Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai
Wangari Muta Maathaiwas a Kenyan environmental and political activist. She was educated in the United States at Mount St. Scholasticaand the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya...
NationalityKenyan
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth1 April 1940
CityNyeri, Kenya
CountryKenya
admiring call knees looking mother trying until wonder
I would be on my knees looking at them and admiring them, trying to have them on my neck, until my mother would call and wonder what ... I was doing in the river.
ground
If they had resources, they would not be killing each other over grazing ground and water.
environment few fight resources
When you have the environment degraded, it is always so that we are going to fight over the few resources that are left.
almost conflict connection democracy few human obvious relationship resources seem sharing today
We are sharing our resources in a very inequitable way. In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace.
death extinction facing forests life matter
It's a matter of life and death for this country, ... The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem.
cannot causes deal empowering environmental involving people promoting root
You must not deal only with the symptoms. You have to get to the root causes by promoting environmental rehabilitation and empowering people to do things for themselves. What is done for the people without involving them cannot be sustained.
environment future invest people protection train
If you want the future generations to live in peace, we must invest in the protection of the environment and we must train especially our young people so that they don't think, for example, the whole world is like Japan.
optimistic important looks
It's very important to remain optimistic and to see the silver lining in everything you do. Because no matter how sometimes things look difficult, and look like there is no hope, there is always a small glimmering of silver lining that is in everything, and I always look for that, and hang on that, and before I know it, another day comes and is gone.
ambition thinking people
There will always be people who think that you have ambitions.
moving thinking government
I think that for anybody who has worked in the civil society, government bureaucracy moves very very slowly.
america long three
I learned in America a long time ago, the three R's, the principle of three R's - reuse, reduce, recycle. And as I say those words, there are so many things individually we can do to reduce - we don't need to consume as much as we are consuming. Reduce. And by reusing, we can reuse a lot of things we just throw into the dumpsite. And reduce the production. The more we reuse, the more we can reduce.
mean giving forever
Having studied biology really helped me a lot because I quickly understand how biological systems work, and how they fail, and the tragedy of when they fail, because we are dealing with life systems, and when we hear that a species has become extinct, or is threatened, you realize that this could mean that this species will disappear from the face of the earth forever! So that understanding really gives you energy to do something to save it.
issues climate climate-change
Unfortunately, the issues of climate change, unlike many other issues, are very subtle because the changes we observe are very, very subtle.
home technology issues
The issue of climate change, it really does bring home the fact that we are on one planet, and that some of the impact of what human beings do in one corner of the world is going to affect people in a distant corner of the world. So we may still feel very far from each other, but we are really very close to each other because of the changes we have made with travel and technology and especially the information technology.