Wangari Maathai inspires local inhabitants and the Green Belt Movement to plant trees and restore Kenya’s landscapes.
By Briana Cohen
Introduction
Earth’s vitality shines vibrantly through the immense Mount Kenya forest, which is home to the Kikuyu Indigenous peoples, bongo antelopes, Colobus monkeys, African wood owls, green-banded swallowtails, and the abundant rain waters flowing into the Tana River. In the 1880s, British colonization and the commodification of the natural world disrupted Kenya’s beautiful landscapes, cutting down trees and extracting living roots to build the city of Nairobi while disintegrating Indigenous economies.
Born on the slopes of Mount Kenya forest, Wangari Maathai experienced the shift from abundant biodiversity and sacred land to one of unbalanced extraction for urbanization. As deforestation continued, Kikuyu women lost their responsibilities for collecting firewood and water. To contend with relational and cultural loss, Wangari advocated for planting trees to the National Women’s Council, thus starting the Green Belt Movement and creating pathways for women’ empowerment and participation in biocultural restoration. As a form of development alternative to colonial forms, the Green Belt Movement favors tree planting practices to re-root planning in the hands of women and nature.
Analysis
Wangari understood the reciprocal relationship Indigenous peoples have with land and felt the villagers’ grievances when colonial forces impacted women’s ability to feed their children without firewood. “Linking emotions and reason and emanating from collective bodies and landscapes,” Wangari’s form of storytelling thus activated women’s agency for transformative change (Ortiz, 2023). The movement not only restored the degraded landscapes, but also mobilized communities and grassroots networks to protect the forest from irresponsible and destructive development. Watson’s recognition of ‘different voices’ within civil society representing valuable perspectives was critical in Kenya, as it is elsewhere in the Global South where planning and development have been historically top-down (Watson, 2009). Decolonial, feminist planning is embodied in the women’s mobilization, planting of trees, and environmental activism (Sweet & Ortiz Escalante, 2015). Wangari and other women are challenging colonial structures by participating as active agents of change despite traditional gender deterrents.
Planting trees is an expression of placemaking, reconstructing the original relationship between people and land/place. The Kikuyu peoples, who have lived in Mount Kenya since the 16th century, view the land as a sacred place and treat the forest with reverence. With “Indigenous urbanity and placemaking as central elements of Amazonian life prior to colonization,” the Green Belt Movement’s actions are upholding Indigenous knowledge systems through forest defense, land revitalization, and cultural regeneration of tending the Earth as a living being (Lamiña, 2024). Wangari has mobilized the collective to return to Indigenous cultural practices inclusive of the sacred connection to Earth, opposing the efforts of colonial erasure.
Implications
To embrace decolonial planning, it is necessary to understand the role of Indigenous knowledge specific to a place and how local land practices upheld the wellbeing of an ecosystem prior to colonial development. Planners should come with an open mind and listening ear to understand ecological, cultural, and relational ways that create a sense of a place that exists outside of the Western Euro-Americentric model. Women-led efforts and collective land-based practices, like the Green Belt Movement’s tree plantings, are examples of development in the Global South that co-produce biocultural restoration and Indigenous placemaking and enable local inhabitants to thrive in the places they live and tend. As Perry (2009) suggests, exclusion of black people and women from education and politics in the Global South has left out a depth of knowledge and connection with the land from planning practices. Perry argues that land and water are vital for black people socially, spiritually, and economically, and “protecting them from privatization and destruction has been an ongoing focus of community-based activism” (Perry, 2009). Black women’s activism is deeply rooted in the politics of the built environment – “how to use, protect, restore, and own spaces and places” (Perry, 2009).
Women, local inhabitants, and native species are thus key actors and participants in the planning processes and are often first to notice when development processes threaten the community’s livelihoods and future generations’ vitality. International planning can repair the damage wrought by colonization by including the local inhabitants, trees, animals, and children of the future generations in planning efforts, and tending the forests that nourish the livelihoods of all beings. Embracing Indigenous knowledge and women’s embodied action could offer planners expansive ways to practice development in relationship with the land, sharing collective and land-based practices of placemaking.
A Kenyan women watering young trees. Source: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/news-and-events/media-resources
Green Belt Movement planting seedlings at the nursery. Source: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/news-and-events/media-resources
Tree nursery in Kenya. Source: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/news-and-events/media-resources
Aurélia Fronty’s illustration of women planting trees in Kenya in children’s book Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees