Wangari Maathai, Ellen Wilson, media in Kenya (credit: Jeff Haskins)

The Dr. Maathai-inspired Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign planted 4 billion trees as of yesterday. It started in 2007.

At a conference in Nairobi that focused on how more trees on farms could help reverse climate change, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai had a story to tell.

It was about a fire that broke out in a huge forest.

“All of the animals are coming out of the forest very disheartened,” she said. “They were saying, ‘Let me leave, as there is nothing we can do.’ They came to the edge of the forest—all except the hummingbird.

“The hummingbird said, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I want to do something about this fire.’ The hummingbird went to a spring and brought back a drop of water and put it on the fire. The bird kept going back and forth putting a drop of water on the fire. All of the other animals stayed on the edge of the forest—even those with larger beaks which could bring more water. They said, ‘What are you doing? You are too little. Come and join us.’ The hummingbird kept going.”

Maathai said that when it comes to growing trees on farms and reforesting in Kenya, every citizen has a role to play. For example, she said, farmers should “not wait for the government” to dig trenches to allow water to sink into the ground rather than run off and strip away the top soil. They should harvest rain water on their land, she said. People should plant trees from large canopied trees to small shrubs.

“Every one of us can be a hummingbird,” she said.

Wangari Maathai, 20 years ago (credit: Ellen Wilson)

“The earth was naked. For me, the mission was to try to cover it with green.”– Wangari Maathai

It is a day like any other, running around Washington, D.C., in a Honda Odyssey, taking children through their errands. This is the suburban life in the US: there’s a birthday party and a gift that needs to be bought. We drive to the toy store to get a Batman action figure for Tristram, and I hope my 6-year-old will not scream and cry about not having any of his own money left to get a toy. In the window, I glimpse a book that immediately takes me back years, to my days of trekking in the uplands north of Nairobi and down into the Rift Valley with four Green Belt Movement members. We went village to village to speak to women about planting trees across their treeless lands.

In Wangari’s Trees of Peace, this woman of inspiration and the movement she created has been memorialized in the form of a children’s book. It is a strange vision, and I wonder how an oversimplified story about Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai has been crafted to be sold to children who are also being sold plastic Legos and Playmobil sets and computer games and books on Star Wars and race cars and Barbie and Groovy Girls and Calico Critters.

Book Cover

I buy the book to read it to my children. I buy it for myself as well. Its last lines say,

“And if you were to climb to the very top of Mount Kenya today, you would see the millions of trees growing below you, and the green Wangari brought back to Africa.”

I saw those green trees. We traveled by public taxi minibuses called matatus and walked for miles and miles on foot, probably stopping in many villages. In every village, we were greeted by women singing and dancing. In every village, Lilian Njehu, an early leader of the movement, spoke to the women for hours and hours about their trees. Sitting on bare benches in the sun under scarce trees for shade, she helped them tend to their trees, speaking in Kikuyu. We saw thousands of seedlings grown in rows in each place and others that had grown to be mature trees—trees for firewood, windbreaks, food, and medicine.

I read the book to my sons that night. They listened intently. When we were through, they asked why Wangari was arrested for trying to protect a park in the middle of Nairobi, for stirring up conflict by training women all across the land to plant trees. “Was she really in jail?” they asked. A few days later, I helped my youngest son plant a bean seedling he had nourished from a seed to life in our kitchen window.  He felt the dirt around the roots, the coolness of the soil in his hands, the feeling of laying to bed a green thing that will grow tall out of dirt—something that will produce the nurturing sustenance of life. It brought me back years again, and I understood anew how millions of nurturing women’s hands in Kenya, and in other countries, brought life out of the land and how their joy and their singing could bring life and peace back to the land.

Bean Seedling (credit: Ellen Wilson)