Planting trees in Kenya is about more than just helping the environment.
Alan Dater

Planting trees in deforested areas brings a host of benefits, as any good environmentalist knows. Trees provide cleaner air, richer soil, wildlife habitat, and shade. They conserve water and protect lands against floods. They absorb carbon dioxide.

Under the rule of an oppressive regime, tree planting can also be a profoundly subversive act.

This is the focus of Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, a documentary about the Kenyan activist that premiers on the PBS series Independent Lens this Tuesday, April 14.

Wangari MaathaiMartin Rowe

By now the story of Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been well told. (Read Grist’s profile from 2004.) After becoming the first woman in East Africa to earn a PhD, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977. The women’s group has planted 30 million trees across the country, employing thousands of women and providing them with education and solidarity.

In Taking Root, by independent filmmakers Alan Dater and Lisa Merton, Maathai says, “When the women started, no one took them seriously, because who takes women seriously? Then the government realized we were organizing women. And they started interfering.”

The film spans Maathai’s life, from her rural childhood and Catholic-school education to the present, but it focuses most heavily on the ways she challenged the Kenyan government, particularly the 24-year dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi.

The interference began with Kenyan officials demanding licenses and restricting meetings from the Green Belt Movement. It grew much more dramatic when Moi proposed replacing Nairobi’s only major public park with a skyscraper and a statue of himself. Maathai and Green Belt organizers successfully appealed to Moi’s international funders to help defend the park.

“In all her fights, that was the biggest fight, because that also was the turning point in this country that no matter how small you are, you can make a difference,” says human rights activist Ngorongo Makanga.

The filmmakers unearth truly impressive archival footage, including scences of the police brutality at Uhuru Park and Kenya’s Karura Forest. It makes for disturbing moments, though they feel necessary to the story, not gratuitous. Some of the most gripping moments are the more pastoral scenes of women working to restore forests and, later, of soldiers in uniform planting trees.

Taking Root has more to say about social change than about forest ecology--I’m not sure it even mentions the types of trees being planted. But it makes abundantly clear the connections between environmental health, human rights, and democracy. I haven’t read them, but Maathai’s autobiography, Unbowed, and her just-released call to action, The Challenge for Africa, look to offer much of the same.

Truth be told, Taking Root often has the good-for-you feel of so many documentaries, the sort of thing you’d watch in civics class. Then again, a college dorm-mate once said that to me about Gandhi. I’m glad I didn’t listen to him and watched it anyway.

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As climate talks continue in Nairobi, Kenya, the world's climate-change canaries aren't far away. Severe floods in the country's northern and coastal regions have killed more than 20 people and forced 60,000 to relocate over the last few weeks, and a flood-drought cycle is disrupting a traditional way of life for 3 million nomadic herders in the north. "These kinds of extreme flooding are the kind of events that are consistent with scientific forecasts on climate change," says Nick Nuttall of the U.N. Environment Program. When the floods go, drought comes: one region has seen a fourfold increase in drought in the last 25 years, according to research by Christian Aid, and drought has also forced some 500,000 people to abandon their wandering ways. Not surprisingly, things are getting ugly: livestock raids have killed at least 150 people in the past five months, and violent clashes have erupted over water. It is, says Christian Aid's Andrew Pendleton, the "climate-change version of Rwanda."

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October 2004 was an exciting time to be a tree-hugger in Wangari Maathai's home country of Kenya. When she was announced as winner of that year's Nobel Peace Prize, many of my environmentally inclined friends and colleagues were eager to help her figure out what to do with the giant megaphone she had just been handed. Earnest volunteers with ideas and expectations streamed in and out of the downtown Nairobi office hurriedly established to handle the crush of publicity, clutching notes on what they thought the new Nobel laureate should do.

She already knew exactly what she wanted to do: continue planting trees. And so, to the consternation of those who wanted her to launch new campaigns and travel the world nonstop, talking about the global crisis facing indigenous forests, she chose to keep close to home. One dazed friend noted that, in her office, requests from local elementary schools to come plant trees were given equal weight to invitations to speak at Oxford University.

Unlike her fellow African Laureate Desmond Tutu, who used the platform provided by the Nobel to travel the world speaking about the evil of apartheid and other human-rights abuses, Maathai has kept her focus on Kenya. And unlike this year's winners, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which have made microfinance a cornerstone of international efforts to tackle poverty, Maathai's Green Belt Movement has found its greatest success in Kenya.

Unbowed, an autobiography by Wangari Maathai.

Read Unbowed, Maathai's autobiography, and you'll quickly understand that her focus has always been on her country. She was among the first generation of young professionals who came back after studying overseas to help the country develop following independence in 1963. She recalls her arrival in Nairobi in January 1966 after finishing her studies in the U.S.:

After this exhilarating ride from the airport came research and teaching positions at the University of Nairobi. Maathai also became involved in civil-society groups and served for a long time as the chairperson of the National Council of Women. Through her work with such groups, she eventually joined a political movement to challenge President Daniel Arap Moi's hold on political power. Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta in 1978, became Maathai's nemesis. Though he had separated from his wife Lena in 1974 (she died three decades later, believing to the end that she would one day be reconciled with him), the president sneered that divorcées such as Maathai had no role in public life. He called her, memorably, "that mad woman."

Unbowed, a straightforward and unfussy memoir, is most moving when it details the challenges this outspoken, accomplished, passionate woman faced in a Kenya that had no tolerance for anything other than quiet girls, quiet matrons, and quiet grandmothers. The first Kenyan woman to earn a PhD, Maathai's professional status and personal life suffered from the Victorian-era gender norms of 1970s Kenya. She fought for equal pay and to be taken seriously by her peers. Her marriage crumbled, due in part, she says, to her husband's inability to handle a strong partner. She endured a humiliating public divorce. She was repeatedly arrested and, in one harrowing sequence in Unbowed, forced to barricade herself inside her house and wait for the police to cut through burglar bars with borrowed army equipment and arrest her.

Kenya has less than 2 percent indigenous forest remaining, and trees are often hacked down to provide wood for charcoal, to clear land for agriculture, or to provide a place for the poor and landless (they are legion) to squat. Maathai's passion is to heal the scarred Kenyan landscape, which no longer resembles the green highlands she grew up in. Her tree planting first began as a commercial venture (she set up an unsuccessful business to sell trees from a nursery in her backyard) and changed into a nonprofit project. As she recounts in Unbowed, planting trees was, for her, a way to improve the lives of rural women by paying them for planting and tending to trees while tackling the alarming rate of deforestation. With support from Norwegian donors, Maathai became the full-time coordinator of the Green Belt Movement in 1982 and expanded her work.

In the way of all biographies, where a few breezy paragraphs cover years of lived experience, she skims over the tremendous work that must have gone into building an extensive rural enterprise that involved nurseries in remote areas, cash payments for tree cultivation, and verification systems that relied heavily on people who had powerful incentive to confirm that all was going well. She writes, "To my great disappointment, over the years we discovered that many of these young men [hired to keep accurate records of planting and survival rates] turned out to be dishonest." She insists that such fraud was detected and dealt with. Now, having gotten past these challenges, the Green Belt Movement claims that it has planted more than 30 million trees in Kenya.

The tree planting became overtly political when the Green Belt Movement opposed the grabbing of public land by officials, who would often pass out choice parcels to political cronies or family members (there is often considerable overlap between these two groups). Maathai points out that rewarding individuals with public land actually began with the British colonialists -- much of the most productive agricultural land in Kenya changed hands in just this way. Unfortunately, this is one legacy that won't die. Under the Moi regime, and even today, politicians hive off land held in public trust and give it to private interests. The Green Belt Movement fought this by planting trees on public land scheduled for private development, then using the media to draw attention to their efforts and to the land in peril.

In 1989, Maathai learned of a plan to build a $200 million skyscraper and business complex in the middle of Uhuru Park, one of the few open spaces left in a place once called "The City in the Sun" and now more often called "Nairobbery." (She eloquently describes the park as "a large swatch of open space amid the bustle of crowds and the concrete and steel of the metropolis." With equal accuracy, if less eloquence, it could be described as a leafy, idyllic haven for the weary pickpocket.) Maathai began a campaign to draw attention to this encroachment on parkland, pitting herself squarely against Moi; not only did the project have his blessing, it called for a huge statue of the president in the middle of the complex.

Due to Maathai's passionate appeals to local and international press, and to the concern expressed by the U.N. Environment Program and other donor groups based in Nairobi, the project was eventually stopped. Unbowed suggests that Maathai's ties to an international network of women's and environmental groups not only stopped the paving of Uhuru Park; it also possibly protected her life. The regime could arrest and harass her, but it knew that many people in the Western world cared about Maathai's fate.

Not that her life was untouched by risk and violence. In one memorable episode, Maathai recalls sneaking into Karura Forest in northern Nairobi through a back way, fording through a cold stream, and planting trees on a forest site given over to private developers. The police placed there to protect the land against vicious people armed with tree seedlings let her go that time, but, on a subsequent visit, hired thugs with sticks beat her badly enough to send her to the hospital.

The struggles over Uhuru Park and Karura Forest turned the simple act of tree planting into a political act, part of a pitched battle to save public land from private use. Maathai became even more political when, after a failed run for the presidency in 1997, she became a parliamentarian for her home region of Tetu. In 2003, President Mwai Kibaki, who succeeded Moi, appointed her assistant minister of environment and natural resources. She continues to hold that position, even after winning the Nobel.

Not all Kenyans appreciate the magnitude of the prize. Maathai is considered about as accomplished as Barack Obama, the American senator whose father was Kenyan, even though there are just a handful of Nobel Peace Prize winners in the world. But the Nobel has vindicated her years of struggle against the Moi regime and justified the idealistic, patriotic pride that brought her back to Kenya in 1966 with her American degrees in hand. Reading Unbowed, one gets the sense that no global prize, no matter how prestigious, can match for Maathai the victory of finally being accepted in her homeland for who she is.

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If the leaders of America's environmental movement need a shot of adrenaline, they would do well to sit down with Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai is the now-legendary mother of the Green Belt Movement, responsible for mobilizing tens of thousands of women to plant a staggering 30 million trees across Kenya over the last three decades. Her grassroots environmental effort, which Maathai grew in the face of oppressive and violent dictatorships, helped bring about a regime change in her native Kenya.

Wangari Maathai.

Born in 1940, Maathai was the first woman from East or Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree. She got her undergraduate education at Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kan., a graduate degree in biology at the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. in anatomy at the University of Nairobi. She has since received honorary doctoral degrees from Yale University and other institutions. In December 2002, Maathai was elected to the Kenyan parliament with an overwhelming 98 percent of the vote, and one month later was appointed assistant minister for environment and natural resources.

Grist's Amanda Griscom Little met with Maathai at her hotel room in New York City while the Nobel laureate was in town on a lecture tour. They chatted about Maathai's belief that a healthy environment is the path to peace, her holistic vision for sustainable development, and her hopes and ambitions for the future of Africa and the world.

Tell us about the origins of the Green Belt Movement and why you decided to center your activism around tree planting.

We started in 1977 to mobilize ordinary women in communities to provide themselves with their basic needs for living, much of which are derived from trees -- firewood for energy, building materials and fencing materials, drinking water, rich soil for planting, fodder for their animals. They learned how to separate the soil for crops and protect areas where their waters come from. Much of the drought in Africa is a result of deforestation, which leaches the soil of minerals and moisture.

In only 30 years your organization has grown 30 million trees. Can you talk about the explosive growth of your concept and how it has lifted up communities?

On the very first day we planted seven trees, and I like to mention this because sometimes people get overwhelmed by 30 million. It is important to understand that this is a process, not something that happens in a bang.

Much more important than the trees themselves is the mobilization of rural populations in large numbers -- populations that we normally think are helpless, are dependent, are not able to do things for themselves. They organized themselves and started to address the issues in their own communities to improve their quality of life. At its peak, we've had over 6,000 groups of women planting trees. In the process they educate themselves and address government issues. Eventually we became a pro-democracy movement.

How did you go from a tree-planting activity to a political movement?

When we started organizing ourselves into many groups, the government started to interfere. We had nearly a dictatorial government that believed in controlling, and they were afraid of why we were organizing. And that's when we contacted the minister of environmental protections, because we realized that in order to protect the environment, we needed to organize and systematically educate ourselves -- we needed to create a more democratic state.

I have read that you faced violent opposition from the police.

We are women [in this organization]. We did not have any guns and we were not going to use force, even when they used force to try to stop us. We realized that all we needed to do to empower ourselves was to understand that we are the ones who can change government, we are the ones who can decide what kind of leaders to put in place. And so we got rid of our fear, we refused to be victims of government intimidation, but instead participated in elections and succeeded in changing leadership.

Now you are the deputy minister for environment. Can you describe how you have shifted your focus from grassroots organizing to establishing a broader framework for sustainable development?

I have enjoyed the great transformation from a civil-society activist to a lawmaker. That is really wonderful because now I don't have to complain to the government, now I'm part of that government, and I can build a new standard for protection.

Can you do as much for the cause from the inside as you did from the outside?

There is a certain constraint in government -- you can't get away with everything because there are other interests that must be taken care of. But I have tried to give myself freedom to disagree and am quite happy now to serve in the government where I can make real changes. I have complained enough, and that's all you can do when you are outside.

Can you give some examples of some of the changes you've made?

For example, the government wanted to take out green spaces in the city and put up buildings in them; people wanted to privatize forests, or own parts of the public land, and there were no policies to stop this. We argued that it is our business to have open spaces and a clean and healthy environment, but the law said no, it's none of your business -- you have to own it to show you have an interest. We have changed that law to say yes, you can have an interest in protecting the commons.

In your Nobel Prize acceptance speech, you talked about the environment as a path to peace: "A degraded environment leads to a scramble for scarce resources and may culminate in poverty and even conflict."

Yes, and I think this is a reality in the whole world, not only in Africa, but perhaps more so in Africa. We have not enjoyed peace or enjoyed good government or enjoyed good management of our natural resources, and therefore have had massive poverty and a lot of conflict.

The connection between peace and the environment can be explained using the [analogy of] the traditional African stool, which has three legs that support the base on which we sit. I believe these three legs are symbolic. One represents good management of our natural resources, equitable distribution of the same, and a sense of accountability. Another represents good government -- a democratic state that respects humankind so that we can have dignity as human beings. The third represents peace. The base on which we sit is development. If you try to do the development where you have no legs, or where you have two legs or one leg, the base is out of balance. It is unsustainable.

In the United States, it seems our development is based on two of the legs: We have democracy and peace (on our own soil, anyway), but we don't have a broad sense of accountability and equal distribution of resources. The desire to consume in America seems to outpace the sense of responsibility for our resource-intensive lifestyles.

I know there is a concern about the consumptive pattern in America, but I also know that there are people in America, large numbers, millions of people who really understand this concept and who have been trying to push for this concept and individually live this concept. There are corporations that try to live this concept. Unfortunately there are also those who don't, and some of those who don't are in power.

But I think you should stop being disempowered. You should focus on the large majority of Americans, for example, who understand, who have power to build a critical mass to shift the politics. That voice is inherently so strong, so practical, so right, and it will be heard.

True, but do you see it as contradictory that the environmental movement in Africa seems to have more resonance with its people than it does in the United States?

You need to keep perspective. For 30 years I worked putting one foot in front of the other and really didn't think that anybody was listening to me; I felt like I had been talking to myself all my life. And then suddenly, the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee tells me that "you're the one that has really been looking at the right balance." I want to encourage those of us who are looking at those issues that way to feel that indeed we are validated. We need to continue that message even more strongly, and even with greater conviction until we win. Because we are the ones who are on the right path.

What did you make of the criticism against you when you got nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? People couldn't see the connection between the environment and peace at a time when the biggest looming concern is terrorism, and yet arguably even terrorism has its roots in inequitable distribution of resources.

It's a challenge for all of us to shift the way we think. By choosing to honor the Green Belt Movement, the Nobel Peace Committee has challenged us to understand that our whole existence is dependent on how we manage our environment. And that in order for us to be able to manage our environment properly, we have to have good government and we have to have peace. We cannot expect to have peace if these other elements are not in place. It's a complex and holistic way of thought and doesn't surprise me that it doesn't immediately make sense to everyone.

What are some examples of places where we have seen environmental stress lead to conflict?

We recently saw the devastation in [the Philippines]* where they had these horrible floods attributed to deforestation upstream; many thousands of people died. A little farther back, remember what happened to Haiti because of that hurricane -- a lot of those people were killed by floods that [were exacerbated by] environmental degradation. In Darfur and Kenya, we have seen fighting over grazing ground. Palestine and Israel have an ongoing struggle over water resources.

In your Nobel commentary you said, "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." Can you elaborate on this notion?

I'm a Christian and a Catholic at that. For me, it's very important to understand that as human beings we are not supposed to be exploitive of other species as we are supposed to be custodians of other species. In my message, especially to ordinary Christians when I talk to them -- I do talk a lot in churches -- I like to remind people that if you read the book of Genesis, you will see that God created other species before he created humanity. He created humanity last. As God was creating, he was making it easier and easier for us to survive, until on Friday, when he created humanity. But if he had created us before, we would probably not have survived. The moral of the story is that it is the other species that were created before us, which we need to survive. Whereas they don't need us.

On a personal level, what drew you to love and understand the environment?

When I was a young person, I grew up in a land that was green, a land that was very pure, a land that was clean. And I remember going to a small stream very close to our homestead to fetch water and bring it to my mother. We used to drink that water straight from the river. I had this fascination with what I saw in the river. Sometimes I would see literally thousands of what looked like glass beads. I would put my little fingers around them in the hope that I would pick them and put them around my neck. But every time I tried to pick them, they disappeared. I would be there literally for hours desperately trying to pick these beads, without success.

Weeks later I would come back, and there would be these thousands of little tadpoles. They are beautiful, pitch black, and in that water they would be energetically flying around and I would try to get them. You can't hold them, they are wiggling and they are very slippery. They eventually disappeared and then the frogs came.

I never realized that the glass beads were jelly sacks of eggs or understood the three stages of frogs until I went to college and learned biology. Once I had all this knowledge about the miracle of science I came home from college to discover that the creek had dried up and my homeland was suffering much environmental damage.

What do you plan to do with the new prestige and profile you have gained in receiving the Nobel Prize? How will it affect your message and movement?

In Africa, I want to challenge government to practice good governance to make that three-legged African stool so we can help our people get out of poverty, get out of conflict, join the democratic space, and start the process of development on the right environmental path. We have tended to depend too much on aid, on being assisted and blaming other people for not assisting us. But I also challenge our leaders, and especially since I'm one of them, to create an environment which can make it possible for our friends to help us and to do more to help ourselves in Africa, make that stool, create that base, and make it wide for as many people as possible.

To learn more about Maathai's work, visit the Plant Trees for Peace website.

*[Correction, 22 Feb 2005: This interview originally pinpointed Malaysia as a recent site of devastating flooding and unrest, but it was the Philippines, not Malaysia, that suffered serious floods late last year.]

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to smile.

Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.

It is a small room for such a momentous decision. And it's made even smaller by the impressive portraits of past winners lining the walls, listening in on the secret deliberations of the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

Amidst the daily drumbeat of war stories, the committee hatched a wonderful surprise in that small third-story room. Today, they announced that Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental activist and biologist-turned-deputy environment minister, will receive the world's most prestigious award -- the first time the Peace Prize has been awarded to honor work in the environmental field. Maathai will now receive the wide recognition she deserves for fighting to protect Kenya's forests from corruption and degradation.

In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, which planted 30 million trees across the country, in the process employing thousands of women and offering them empowerment, education, and even family planning.

A Green Belt Movement outpost.

Photo: Geoffrey Dabelko.

GBM was grounded in the firm belief that environmental protection is inextricably linked to improving human living conditions. As Maathai told the UNESCO Courier in 1999, "If you want to save the environment, you should protect the people first, because human beings are part of biological diversity. And if we can't protect our own species, what's the point of protecting tree species?"

This grassroots movement had a broader impact than more traditional "environmental" movements. GBM focused on empowerment through the environment, which led Maathai to clash with Kenya's ruling elites.

During Daniel arap Moi's decades-long rule, the fight for environmental protection and democracy was not always easy. Maathai's demonstrations to protect the forests often met violent resistance. Upon being jailed by a government intent on defending corruption and mismanagement, she proclaimed, "The government thinks that by threatening me and bashing me they can silence me. But I have an elephant's skin and somebody must raise their voice."

Wangari raised her voice higher in 1997 by running for president on the Liberal Party of Kenya ticket. In 2002 -- after Moi's Kenya Africa National Union party lost the presidential race -- she was elected to Parliament, and the next year was appointed deputy minister of environment for the new government.

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to an environmental activist may raise some eyebrows. But Maathai is on the front lines of the struggle over natural resources that fuels conflicts across the world. While there is no dramatic footage of tanks rumbling across borders or airplanes flying into buildings, the everyday fight for survival of those who depend directly on natural resources -- forests, water, minerals -- for their livelihoods is at the heart of the battle for peace and human security. Maathai told Norway's TV2, "When natural resources get scarce, wars are started. If we improve the management of our natural resources, we help promote peace."

Maathai receiving the Goldman
Environmental Prize in 1991.

Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.

"Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment," said the Norwegian Nobel Committee. "Maathai stands at the front of the fight to promote ecologically viable social, economic, and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa." The committee chair said Maathai "represents an example and a source of inspiration for everyone in Africa fighting for sustainable development, democracy, and peace."

Those focusing on today's hard security agenda of war and terrorism praise the award, too. Former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, said, "Today we face a range of difficult security challenges across the globe. The Nobel Committee has done a great service in highlighting the struggles for sustainable development, democracy, and peace that affect the safety and quality of life of literally billions of people every day."

The committee chose well to add another picture to its hallowed walls, one of a woman from the Global South fighting for peace in the trenches, from the small villages of Kenya's heartland to the crowded streets of Nairobi. Much of the debate about the link between environment and security plays out in the rarified air of Northern universities and think tanks (including my own) -- even as they issue reams of paper about a South they only visit for conferences. Elevating such a strong Southern voice -- and one whose elephant's skin bears the scars of the fight for peace -- is a noble choice.

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Seeking to capitalize on the potential of renewable energy sources, 10 African nations are collaborating to increase their combined geothermal power generation to 1,000 megawatts by 2020. Geothermal power yields electricity by trapping steam released by water reservoirs deep inside the Earth. It is a clean and reliable energy source, and the United National Environment Programme estimates that together, the 10 countries in question (Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia) could produce up to 7,000 megawatts of electricity through geothermal power. To date, though, only Kenya produces geothermal energy -- and just 57 megawatts of it. The U.S. State Department, Trade and Development Agency, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation have pledged to help fund the cost of establishing a geothermal energy infrastructure in the African nations.

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‘Heretic’ battles straw man

Five southern African nations are requesting permission to resume ivory trading at an international conference that begins today in Santiago, Chile. They are asking the 160 countries that have signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to allow them to clear out stockpiles -- mainly from elephants that died naturally -- and to sell 14 tons more of ivory each year. Under such a framework, South Africa alone might raise $3 million from a one-time sale and about $200,000 a year after that. The five countries say their elephant populations are now too large, posing threats to the environment. Meanwhile, Kenya and India, whose elephant populations continue to be at risk, are siding with environmentalists, arguing that even discussing the idea of expanding ivory trade would lead to increased poaching in their countries. Since the ban on ivory trading began 13 years ago, the number of elephants killed in Kenya has declined from several thousand per year to only scores per year.

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Responding to criticism that his government has overseen the widespread destruction of forests, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi announced yesterday a plan to strictly enforce bans on timber cutting. Moi also announced that he would seek support from the U.N. Development Programme for a campaign to plant trees. Sounds good, but Moi has not historically been a friend to environmentalists, who have accused him of parceling out sections of the nation's dwindling forests in exchange for votes and political support. Moi banned all such land allocations in February, following the publication in national newspapers of official documents showing that 412,700 acres of state-owned land had been granted to public officials (including none other than Moi himself).

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Does anyone still care about “the land”?

If Kenya gets its way, water distribution in east Africa could change dramatically: The nation's energy minister, Raila Odinga, has called for a review of the 1929 British colonial treaty that grants Egypt the right to veto projects involving use of the headwaters of the Nile. Odinga called the treaty outdated and said it fails to take into account the interests of countries other than Egypt that also depend on the Nile as their main water source. Ethiopia, whose catchment areas account for 86 percent of Nile waters, has echoed Kenya's demands by calling for an end to a 1959 water-sharing treaty between Egypt and Sudan. Odinga said that countries that use the water downstream should compensate those nations that protect and conserve catchment areas and other parts of the river system.

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Disappearing slave history

Even though Kenya is a major food exporter, it hasn't reaped much benefit from the $20 billion-per-year global market in organic foods. Now some farmers and nonprofits in the African nation are trying to change that. Many Kenyans already grow their crops without chemical inputs, but up till now, not a single one has been certified as an organic farmer -- and without such certification, farmers can't benefit from the lucrative natural foods market. Advocates of organic farming say that although the practice can be labor intensive, it is more sustainable, yields more healthful food, and reduces reliance on expensive imported chemicals. The biotechnology industry, however, dismisses organic food as spoils for the spoiled, and says the future of agriculture in Africa lies with genetically modified crops.

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Europe places outcome of Copenhagen squarely on Obama

"The future of Kenyan tourism is green," says Judy Gona, executive director of the Ecotourism Society of Kenya, which is working to create a low-impact, more environmentally friendly tourism industry in the second-most visited country in Africa. ESOK's 80 members are mostly small, secluded camps and lodges that are built with local materials. They use alternative energy sources and serve locally produced food. Even some of the country's larger, mass-market tourist lodges are adopting eco-friendly policies, such as heating water with solar power instead of firewood. Others, however, are trying to cash in on the ecotourism label without changing their ways. To sift good from bad, ESOK hopes to have in place by next year the continent's first ecotourism certification system.

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