Kenyan conservationist and campaigner Wangari Maathai dies at 71

Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, has died at the age of 71 after a long battle with cancer. She won the prize for her devotion to forest conservation in Kenya, campaigning tirelessly on tree planting and conservation.

Maathai founded the Green Belt movement in 1977 which looked to improve the environment in an effort to better the lives of poor people and especially women. She particularly found forest conservation to be important. “It's a matter of life and death for this country, the Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem,” she said. Her movement has gone on to plant 47 million trees to fight deforestation.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said: “Wangari Maathai was a force of nature. While others deployed their power and life force to damage, degrade and extract short term profit from the environment, she used hers to stand in their way, mobilize communities and to argue for conservation and sustainable development over destruction."

“In winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the world caught up with the essence and life-time understanding of this special person: namely that environmental stability and sustainability will increasingly be crucial for a peaceful world and for over turning poverty, inequality and meeting the rights of women,” he added.

Maathai’s Nobel first was not a lone achievement, she became the first woman in Kenya to receive a doctorate for veterinary medicine and be appointed a professor. As she went through a divorce, she simply added another ‘a’ to her name to confound her husband, who took her to court to keep her from using his name. She was certainly a strong willed determined person, who fought for anything she deemed worthwhile and she sometimes suffered for this, being beaten in a demonstration against the sale of public forests in 1999.

Perhaps her most powerful message was thus, “you cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.”

Africa needs more people like this to take on its problems of corruption, environmental degradation, poverty and social issues.