Unbowed my autobiography wangari maathai nobel

1“Collecting firewood for the household was a frequent activity and I would often help my mother do it. The country was dotted with hundreds of huge mĩgumo, or wild fig trees, their bark the color of elephant skin and thick, gnarled branchesWhen my mother told me to go and fetch firewood, she would warn me, "Don’t pick any dry wood out of the fig tree, or even around it." "Why?" I would ask. "Because that’s a tree of God,"she’d reply. "We don’t use it. We don’t cut it. We don’t burn it."I later learned that there was a connection between the fig tree’s root system and the underground water reservoirs. The roots burrowed deep into the ground, breaking through the rocks beneath the surface soil and diving into the underground water table.

2About two hundred yards from the fig tree there was a stream named Kanungu, with water so clean and fresh that we drank it straight from the stream. As a child, I used to visit the point where the water bubbled up from the belly of th

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A review of Wangari Maathai&#;s autobiography Unbowed

October 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 wei

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Unbowed: A Memoir

Maathai, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya. Born in a rural by in , she was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her become the first woman both in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government; the establishment, in , of the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women bygd paying them to plant trees in their villages; and how her courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now servesFrom publisher description.