WANGARI MAATHAI accepts Nobel Peace Prize

WANGARI MAATHAI – First woman in central or eastern Africa to hold a Ph.D. She started the Green Belt Movement, a simple organization maintained mostly by women that sees to planting trees all over Kenya. The program has not only encouraged environment rejuvenation in Kenya, it was one of the major factors in the Kenyan struggle for democracy.

Maathai’s ethos is who she is, obviously, and what she’s being presented, the Nobel Peace Prize. She has already earned the right to argue from her own success.

The logos is the most fascinating part of the speech, because it is an issue so simple and easily overlooked while also something that could revolutionize the African continent which is ravaged from decades of deforestation. If other people in other countries would encourage a program like this, they would see the immediate effects of equality between men and women, a popular movement for fair democratic processes, etc. The truth is that the reason many of these countries don’t implicate such an easy program is that they fear equality and democracy (that’s starting to sound like a W. speech, but it’s true).

I was very interested by her comment, "Many countries, which have poor governance systems, are also likely to have conflicts and poor laws protecting the environment. " She seems to suggest, using the Green Belt Movement as an example, that by striving to improve the environment, one can improve his/her government.

Her pathos came at the end with her story:

As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents.

Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.

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http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture.html