Читать книгу The Book of Awesome Women - Becca Anderson - Страница 13
ОглавлениеEco Awesome: Saving Mother Earth
Whether fighting to save gorillas in the mists of Africa or chaining themselves to trees to stop the logging of old growth forests, women have been at the forefront of the green revolution around the world. Indeed, the person said to be responsible for the birth of the modern environmental movement was a woman born at the beginning of the twentieth century, Rachel Carson.
Being an eco warrior often means putting your very life in danger. Judi Bari of Earth First nearly died when someone planted a bomb in her car after she got too successful in her campaign to save the redwoods of northern California, and hundreds of peasant women in India have looked down the barrel of a gun in their attempts to preserve the trees that maintain their climate and provide the essentials of life in rural villages.
Perhaps it is only natural that the nurturing power of women be directed back toward the source of all life—Mother Gaia. At the cusp of a new millennium, we face the continual extinction of species, the razing of precious rainforests—the “lungs” of the planet—and the scare of toxic oceans, thinning ozone, and global warming. Although governmental and corporate spin doctors deny the threat of an overheated planet, environmentalists work assiduously to ensure a healthy world for future generations. The dream of a better, healthy world is an issue that certainly affects every human being. The stories of these courageous women should inspire everyone to do what we can—recycle, reuse, reduce, get out of our cars, plant trees, garden, compost, and work together to protect the environment. This is one area in which we all have infinite opportunities to be sheroes and heroes every day, one small act at a time. This movement has grown to become the critical issue of our day. These eco-sheroes and preservationist pioneers are, literally, saving the world!
Rachel Carson: “The Natural World…Supports All Life”
World famous ecologist and science writer Rachel Carson turned nature writing on its head. Before she came along, notes Women Public Speakers in the United States, “the masculine orientation [to the subject] emphasized either the dominant, aggressive encounter of humanity with wild nature or the distancing of nature through scientific observation.” By creating a different, more feminine, relationship to nature, one which saw humans as part of the great web of life, separate only in our ability to destroy it; Rachel Carson not only produced the first widely read books on ecology, but laid the foundation for the entire modern environmental movement.
Rachel inherited her love of nature from her mother, Maria, a naturalist at heart, who took Rachel for long walks in woods and meadows. Born in 1907, Rachel was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania where the evidence of industry was never too far away. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania had changed a great deal from the sylvan woodlands named for colonial William Penn. Coal mines and strip mines had devastated some of the finest farmland. Chemical plants, steel mills, and hundreds of factories were belching pure evil into the air.
As she grew, Rachel’s love of nature took an unexpected turn toward oceanography, a budding science limited by technological issues for divers. The young girl was utterly fascinated by this particular biological science, and though she majored in English and loved to write, she heard the ocean’s siren song increasingly. While in college at Pennsylvania College for Women in the middle 1920s, she changed her major to biology, despite the overwhelming advice of her teachers and professors to stay the course in English, a much more acceptable major for a young woman. Her advisors were quite correct in their assertions that women were blocked from science; there were very few teaching positions except at the handful of women’s colleges, and even fewer job prospects existed for women.
However, Rachel listened to her heart and graduated with high honors, a fellowship to study at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory for the summer, and a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins in Maryland to study marine zoology. Rachel’s first semester in graduate school coincided with the beginning of The Great Depression. Her family lost the farm; her parents and brother came to live with her in her tiny campus apartment. She helped make ends meet with part-time teaching at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, while continuing her studies. In 1935, Rachel’s father suffered a heart attack and died quite suddenly. Rachel looked desperately for work to support her mother and brother only to hear the same old discouragements—no one would hire her as a full-time university science professor. Brilliant and hardworking, Rachel was encouraged to teach grade school or, better yet, be a housewife because it was “inappropriate” for women to work in science.
Finally, her unstinting efforts to work in her field were ultimately rewarded by a job writing radio scripts for Elmer Higgins at the United States Bureau of Fisheries, a perfect job for her because it combined her strength in writing with her scientific knowledge. Then a position opened up at the Bureau for a junior aquatic biologist. The job was to be awarded to the person with the highest score: Rachel aced the test and got the position. Elmer Higgins saw that her writing was excellent, making science accessible to the general public. At his direction, she submitted an essay about the ocean to the Atlantic Monthly, which not only published Rachel’s piece, but asked her to freelance for them on a continuing basis, resulting in a book deal from a big New York publishing house.
By now, Rachel was the sole support of her mother, brother, and two nieces. She raised the girls, supported her mother, and worked a demanding full-time job, leaving her research and writing to weekends and late nights. But she prevailed nonetheless. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, debuted in 1941 to a bemused and war-preoccupied public. It was a completely original book, enacting a narrative of the seacoast with the flora and fauna as characters, the first indication of Rachel’s unique perspective on nature.
Rachel’s second book, The Sea Around Us, was a nonfiction presentation of the relationship of the ocean to earth and its inhabitants. This time, the public was ready, and she received the National Book Award and made the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years! The Edge of the Sea was also very well received, both critically and publicly. Rachel Carson’s message of respect and kinship with all life combined with a solid foundation of scientific knowledge found a real audience in postwar America. However, shy and solitary Rachel avoided the spotlight by accepting a grant that allowed her to return to her beloved seacoast, where she could be found up to her ankles in mud or sand, researching.
As her popularity rose and her income from book royalties flooded in, Rachel was able to quit her job and build a coastal cottage for herself and her mother. She also returned the grant money, asking it be redistributed to needy scientists. In 1957, a letter from one of Rachel’s readers changed everything for her. The letter came from Olga Owens Huckins, who was reporting the death of birds after airplanes sprayed dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, DDT, a chemical then in heavy use. Rachel Carson was keenly interested in discovering DDT’s effects on the natural habitat. Her findings were shocking: if birds and animals weren’t killed outright by DDT, its effects were even more insidious—thin eggshells that broke before the hatchlings were fully developed. It was also suspected of being carcinogenic to humans.
Rachel vowed to write a book about the devastating impact of DDT upon nature “or there would be no peace for me,” she proclaimed. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with cancer. Despite chemotherapy, surgery, and constant pain, Rachel worked slowly and unstintingly on her new book. In 1962, Silent Spring was published. It was like a cannon shot. Chemical companies fought back, denied, and ran for cover against the public outcry. Vicious charges against Rachel were aimed at what many of the captains of the chemical industry viewed as her Achilles heel—her womanhood. “Not a real scientist,” they claimed. She was also called unstable, foolish, and sentimental for her love of nature. With calm logic and cool reason, Rachel Carson responded in exacting scientific terms, explaining the connections among DDT, the water supply, and the food chain.
Ultimately, President John F. Kennedy assigned his Science Advisory Committee to the task of examining the pesticide, and Rachel Carson was proven to be absolutely correct. She died two years later, and although her reputation continued to be maligned by the chemical industry, her work was the beginning of a revolution in the responsible use of chemicals and serves as a reminder of the reverence for all life.
“Perhaps if Dr. Rachel Carson had been Dr. Richard Carson the controversy would have been minor…The American technocrat could not stand the pain of having his achievements deflated by the pen of this slight woman.”
— Joseph B.C. White, author
Marjory Stoneman Douglas:
Patron Saint of the Everglades
Although not native to the southernmost state, Marjory Stoneman Douglas took to the Florida Everglades like a “duck to water,” becoming since 1927 the great champion of this rare habitat. She was born to lake country in Minnesota in 1890, during one of her father’s many failed business ventures, which kept the family moving around the country. On a family vacation to Florida at the age of four, Marjory fell in love with the Floridian light and vowed to return.
Marjory escaped her unstable home life in the world of books. An extremely bright girl, she was admitted to Wellesley College when higher education for women was still quite uncommon. Her mother died shortly after her graduation in 1911. Feeling unmoored, she took an unrewarding job at a department store, and shortly thereafter married a much older man, Kenneth Douglas, who had a habit of writing bad checks.
Leaving for Florida with her father for his latest business pursuit seemed like the perfect way to get away from her petty criminal husband and sad memories. Frank Stoneman’s latest ideas, however, seemed to have more merit: founding a newspaper in the scruffy boom town of Miami (the paper went on to become the Miami Herald). Marjory eagerly took a job as a cub reporter. Opinionated, forward-thinking, and unafraid to share unpopular views, both Stonemans found their niche in the newspaper trade. One of the causes they were in unswerving agreement on was Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward’s plan to drain the Everglades to put up more houses. Father and daughter used the paper as their soapbox to cry out against this ghastly idea with all their might.
Roused to action, Marjory educated herself about the facts surrounding the Everglades issue and discovered many of the denizens of Florida’s swampy grassland to be in danger of extinction. The more she learned, the more fascinated she became. When decades later she decided to leave the newspaper to write fiction, she often wove the Everglades into her plots. Marjory learned that the Everglades were actually not a swamp, but rather wetlands. In order to be a swamp, the waters must be still, whereas in the Everglades water flows in constant movement. Marjory coined the term “river of grass” and in 1947 wrote a book about this precious ecosystem entitled The Everglades: River of Grass.
More than anything else, Marjory’s book helped people see the Everglades not as a fetid swamp, but as a national treasure without which Florida might become desert. After the publication of her book, Harry Truman designated a portion of the Florida wetlands as Everglades National Park. The triumph was short-lived, however. The Army Corp of Engineers began tunneling canals all over the Everglades, installing dams and floodgates. As if that weren’t enough, they straightened the course of the Kissimmee River, throwing the delicate ecosystem into complete shock.
At the age of seventy-eight, Marjory Stoneman Douglas joined in the fight, stopping bulldozers ready to raze a piece of the Everglades for an immense jetport. Almost blind and armed with little more than a big floppy sun hat and a will of iron, Marjory founded Friends of the Everglades, going on the stump to talk to every Floridian about the devastation to this rare resource and building the organization member by member to thousands of people in thirty-eight states. “One can do so much by reading, learning, and talking to people,” she noted. “Students need to learn all they can about animals and the environment. Most of all, they need to share what they have learned.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas and “Marjory’s Army” as her group came to be known, stopped the jetport in its tracks, garnered restrictions on farmers’ use of land and chemicals, saw to the removal of the Army’s “improvements,” and enjoyed the addition of thousands of acres to the Everglades National Park, where they could be protected from land grabbing developers. In 1975 and 1976, Marjory was rewarded for her hard work by being named Conservationist of the Year two years in a row. In 1989, she became the Sierra Club’s honorary vice president. Protecting the Everglades became Marjory’s life work, a job she loved. She never considered retiring and continued living in the same house she’d been in since 1926 and worked every day for Friends of the Everglades until her passing in 1998 at 109 years old. She saved millions of acres.
“Find out what needs to be done and do it!”
— Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Join Marjory’s Army!
You can contact Friends of the Everglades and continue her work: www.everglades.org
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Bard of the Backwood
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings used to play “Story Lady” in Washington, D.C., as a girl, making up stories to tell the boys from her neighborhood. As an adult, she and her husband moved to Cross Creek, Florida, where she fell in love with the unique people of south Florida and their hearts in the face of hardship, poverty, and starvation, which she immortalized in her memoir Cross Creek. Like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rawlings helped focus the nation’s attention on an area previously disregarded as a “wasteland” through her O’Henry award-winning short stories, like “Gal Young Un” and “The Black Secret,” and her novels—South Moon Under, The Sojourner, and the children’s classic, The Yearling. The Yearling shows Rawlings at the top of her craft, with her beautifully rendered story and sense of place winning a Pulitzer prize award in 1939. The Yearling was made into a film that received both critical and popular acclaim; both the novel and the film are regarded as classics for their sensitive portrayal of life in the Florida Everglades.
Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness
Born in 1901, pioneer rainforest activist Gertrude Elizabeth Loertsher’s fascination with native peoples began as a child in Switzerland when she read about American Indians and acted out the stories with her friends after school. She didn’t feel the same pull toward academia, however, and pursued horticulture and social work rather than a more traditional educational career. She spent a year in England with a Quaker family whose way of life and pacifist philosophy she found imminently appealing. After a failed marriage to a neighbor’s son back home in Bern, Trudi, as she liked to be called, traveled to Germany in the 1930s, where she was shocked by the rise of fascism. The daughter of a Jewish mother and a Protestant minister father, Trudi’s own sensibility toward peace and justice was poles apart from the Nazi party. Upon Hitler’s election as chancellor in 1933, the Nazis’ power was dominant; any actions or talk against it were treated as treason.
Trudi’s sympathies were entirely anti-Nazi, and she risked her life many times to get information about Nazi horror stories to the newspapers in her native Switzerland, outsmarting the ruling party of martinets and murderers again and again. Times got harder and getting out of Germany became increasingly difficult; Gertrude finally inveigled passage to France, where she worked for the Resistance, traveling to the United States to aid other European refugees. Upon returning to France, she was put in prison after the Nazi takeover.
Ultimately the Swiss government got her out of France, and she made her way to Mexico to rest and get some distance from political strife. She developed a new interest in photography, making women factory workers her subject. Her photographs were compelling, filled with both a beauty and depth in the faces weathered by difficult lives. Mexico itself filled Trudi with awe; it was both a new home and a muse catapulting her toward discovery. She traveled the vast country in search of the meaning she knew lay in the land. Her first sight of the Mexican jungle was an epiphany: “This jungle filled me with a sense of wonder that has never left me,” she noted many years later. The mysterious forest and Lacandon Indians who lived there showed her a way to live in the world that was vastly different from her European background. Trudi learned from these people, studying their traditional ways only to discover their life in the jungle was in jeopardy; Mexican peasants were being relocated to the rainforest state of Chiapas bordering Guatemala and left to scratch a living from the dirt.
Trudi’s life was in flux, as well. She met and married Danish archeologist, cartographer, and traveler, Franz Blom, who shared Trudi’s fascination with the Mayan culture and Indian peoples. Together, they pursued their love of the rainforest and thirst for knowledge constantly, mapping the land and recording their findings in journals and Trudi’s photography, which they published. The husband and wife team came to a deep understanding of the Lacondan rainforest and its people. They perceived the fragility of this environment and sought to preserve it, founding Na Bolom, a research institution and center for visiting scholars, travelers, and anyone caring to learn about the Mayan civilization and its modern descendants.
Trudi also figured a practical way to undo some of the damage Lacandones had suffered. She invited tree experts to assist her in establishing a nursery to replant the rainforest, making the trees free to anyone who would plant them. Trudi worked diligently on the lecture circuit to pay for the seedlings, building the annual crop to 30,000 trees a year before her death in 1993 (her ninety-second year). Na Bolom carries on her work educating and reforesting the Mayan rainforest.
“The time has come for us to wake up to what we are doing and take steps to stop this destruction.”
— Gertrude Blom
Jane Goodall: Not Just Monkeying Around
Born in 1934, English zoologist Jane Goodall owes her career to the fact that her divorced mother couldn’t afford to send her to college. Instead, the amateur naturalist worked in offices and waitressed in order to pay for travel to feed her great curiosity. In 1960, she received an invitation to visit a friend whose family had moved to Kenya. While there, the young woman worked up the nerve to contact Louis and Mary Leakey, who were working there to find evidence of early humans in the Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift. The Leakeys found her to be an able companion, well suited to work in the field looking for fossil fragments or at Kenya’s National Museum of Natural History, reconstructing what they found. Despite the fact that she had no formal scientific training, Dr. Louis Leakey asked Jane to go to Tanzania to conduct a lengthy study of chimpanzees in the wild. He believed that by studying chimpanzees, we stand to learn much about the life of early humans.
Jane, who was much more interested in animals than in Stone Age ancestors, jumped at the change—this would be the first such long-term study of this animal in its natural habitat. When the African government refused to allow her to work alone in the animal refuge, Jane’s mother offered to accompany her. Despite her lack of training, Jane was well suited to the task of scientific observation; she kept meticulous notes and went to any length to find chimps, hiking miles into the forest each day. Goodall’s work was the stuff of scientific revolution. She disproved many erroneous beliefs about chimpanzees. For example, she learned that they are omnivores, not vegetarian; make and use tools; have elaborate social structures and a variety of humanlike emotions; and give their young unconditional affection. She has been decried by stuffy male zoologists for giving the chimps names, like Graybeard, instead of numbers in her papers. Jane did it “her way” and outdid all the uptight academics with her commitment, endurance, and plain smarts. In many ways, she received better treatment from her subjects than her peers, especially in the heartwarming moment when a male chimpanzee accepted a nut from Jane’s hand, clasping her hand soulfully before discarding the nut. Jane was touched at his attempt to spare her feelings about the unwanted nut.
In 1964, Jane met and married a young photographer who came to her camp to take photos of the chimps, and they had a son. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in ethnology from Cambridge (one of the only people ever to receive one without a B.A.!), and her findings have been published widely. Returning to Africa, she founded the Gombe Stream Research Centre, which is this year celebrating decades of continuous research in Gombe National Park. In recent years, her work has taken a slightly different turn, however, in protecting the chimpanzees she studied and befriended in Africa through the Chimpanzee Guardian Project. She lectures around the world to raise money to try and stop the continued shrinking of their habitat and their decline in numbers from more than 10,000 during the time of her study to less than 3,000 today.
The author of many books and the winner of a multitude of awards, Jane Goodall pursues her interests with singular purpose and passion. In a realm where money and education are usually the deciding factors, she started with nothing but her natural intelligence and an open, curious mind. She went on to achieve the top recognition in her field and to become one of the most beloved figures in science today.
“Every individual matters and has a role to play in this life on earth. The chimpanzees teach us that it is not only human but also non-human beings who matter in the scheme of things.”
— Jane Goodall
Mary Leakey: Digging for Truth
Mary and Louis Leakey worked together in the search for the origins of man. Mary’s fabled perspicacity for digging and sifting was matched by her acerbic manner and love of good strong cigars. Of the famous duo, Mary was the one with the lucky spade. In 1948, Mary uncovered the skull and facial bones of the much ballyhooed hominid that came to be known as “the missing link.” In her trademark no-nonsense manner, Mary mused, “For some reason that skull caught the imagination.” In 1959 in the Olduvai Gorge of northern Tanzania, she discovered some teeth and the palate bone of the oldest ancestor of man up to that point. Upon finding other bones, they were able to determine that the five-foot, barrel-chested, small-brained, and browless hominid Zinjanthropus had walked upright a million years ago. Three years after Louis Leakey’s death in 1972, working widow Mary surpassed her own historical findings when she found the tracks of bipedal creatures 3.6 million years old, preserved in volcanic ash, and she later unearthed the jawbones of eleven other humanoids carbon-dated to 3.75 million years old! Mary passed the torch, or rather spade, to her son when she died in December of 1996 at the age of eighty-three. We owe a great deal of our new understanding of human evolution to Mary’s nose for old bones! “Her commitment to detail and perfection made my father’s career,” said son Richard E. Leakey. “He would not have been famous without her. She was much more organized and structured and much more of a technician.”
Dian Fossey: Gorillas and the Myth
Occupational therapist Dian Fossey felt a primal call to go to Africa, where she could study mountain gorillas. Taking out a personal loan, in 1963 she headed to the southern hemisphere, stopping by to say hello to Jane Goodall and the Leakeys, who encouraged her to do a gorilla field study. Traveling to Zaire (otherwise known as the “heart of darkness” to you Conrad fans), she found her research subjects—or rather sniffed out the odoriferous primates. “I was struck by the physical magnificence of the huge jet-black bodies blended against the green palette of the thick forest foliage.” Taking the “when in Rome” tack, she won the apes over by mimicking their moves, eventually living among fifty-one gorillas. Indeed, her observations proved that the mountain gorillas were actually peaceful vegetarians in great danger of extinction from poaching and habitat shrinkage.
Dian Fossey defended her gorillas and their turf bravely, earning the enmity of Rwandan tribespeople. She was devastated when her beloved gorilla Digit and two others were slaughtered in what seems to have been a threat to her in 1978. Fossey made a plea to the world to help her save the gorillas, greatly furthered by her book Gorillas in the Mist and the eponymous movie featuring Sigourney Weaver in the starring role. After teaching at Cambridge and raising cash for the “Digit fund” to help the mountain gorillas, Dian Fossey (called Nyiramachabelli by the Rwandans: “the old lady who lives in the forest without a man”) returned to stay with her gorilla families again, but her reunion was short-lived. She was found murdered on Christmas Eve of 1985 in the gorilla park habitat. Dian Fossey was buried beside Digit. Her murder has never been solved.
Petra Kelly: Green Knight
Environmental activist Petra Karin Kelly was interested in social issues from a very early age. Born in West Germany in 1947, she moved to Columbus, Georgia, with her mother and stepfather, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John E. Kelly, in 1960, where she immediately became involved in the civil rights movement. Learning English quickly, during high school she had called a weekly radio program in current affairs. For college, she attended the school of International Service at American University where she studied world politics and graduated with honors in 1970. In addition to her studies, she was also very active in campus political movements—antiwar, antinuclear, and feminist, as a volunteer for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and later for Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, with whom she maintained a friendship and correspondence. Her focus shifted when her sister Grace died from cancer in 1970. Petra Kelly created a citizen action group centered in Europe to study the connection between cancer and environmental pollution, eventually campaigning full-time for the Green Party she cofounded in 1979 and spearheading the Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Europe. In one year, she estimated she held more than 450 meetings in order to get the Greens elected to the German parliament, becoming the first German woman at the head of a political party.
Petra had an innate understanding of the inner workings of politics, and together with her fellow Green Party members, including her lover, Gert Bastian, was surprisingly successful in getting candidates into the governments not only of Germany, but throughout Europe, despite the Green Party’s radically pro-environment stances. As time went on, Petra’s actions became increasingly radical and drew more criticism from conservatives than ever before—she put together a “war crimes tribunal” at Nuremberg on the issue of nuclear weapons, and in 1983, staged a no-nukes demonstration that ended in her arrest, followed by another protest in Moscow. Petra led the Greens into more frays—blockading military bases all over Germany and leading protests in the U.S., Australia, and Great Britain.
Petra was an immensely charismatic leader, capturing the attention of thousands of people, especially young people, around the world. Her pure idealism and willingness to take personal risks captivated the youth of Europe. She received hundreds of letters each week offering support and was in high demand for lectures, articles, and books. Issues pertaining to children were especially close to her heart. She adopted a young Tibetan girl, Nima, and worked to educate the world about Tibetan genocide.
In 1991, Petra and her soulmate, Gert, were discovered dead in a suburb of Bonn by police, summoned by Kelly’s worried grandmother. They had both been shot and were in an advanced state of decomposition. Police have never been able to solve the double death, although the police believed it to be a double suicide. Others may have claimed it was a murder plot by anti-Green neo-Nazis who Gert had decried in newspaper articles. Police are basing the double-suicide theory on a powder burn on Gert’s hand and the lack of other fingerprints or footprints in the apartment, and they have produced background information on Gert Bastian as a former SS agent who had worked for the Nazis in his youth. Thirty years older than Petra, he had once been a virulent right-winger before doing a 180-degree turnaround to join the Green Party. Close friends recall Gert depressedly saying that the “new” Germany reminded him of the old Germany of his fascist youth.
Although we may never know what really happened to Petra Kelly, we do know that while she lived, she made important inroads to drawing the world’s attention to nuclear armaments, environmental destruction, children’s rights, and world peace. She lived entirely for the benefit of humankind.
Karen Silkwood: Chain Reaction
The story of Karen Silkwood is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. On November 13, 1974, she died in a car crash under suspicious circumstances after she very vocally criticized the safety of the plutonium fuels production plant she worked for in Crescent, Oklahoma. She had been on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter to give him evidence that Kerr-McGee was knowingly passing off defective fuel rods as good.
Prior to her death, she was inexplicably exposed to extremely high levels of plutonium. Karen had learned to routinely test herself for exposure, but nothing prepared her for the discoveries made by the Healthy Physics Office upon her request. Although no plutonium was found on any surfaces in the lab she was working in, her apartment was found to have been contaminated. Starting with a measure of 1 disintegrations per minute or dpms as the lowest possible positive result, these measurements were found in her house, according to PBS’ online information site: 400,000 dpm on a package of bologna and cheese in the fridge, 25,000 on the stove sides, 6,000 on a package of chicken, and 100,000 on the toilet seat. After her death, an autopsy determined that Karen Silkwood’s exposure to plutonium had been very recent and the plant could never come up with an explanation for her exposure. A year after her death, the plant closed.
The speculation surrounding her death has never stopped, but proof of company malfeasance has remained inconclusive. It is known, however, that it was Kerr-McGee who sold rods to the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, where defective fuel rods broke down and released radioactivity into the atmosphere.
Wangari Maathai: Green Goddess
Wangari Maathai is a remarkable woman. She set her sights on saving the farmlands, forests, and grasslands of the most politically unstable continent she calls home—Africa. To that end, she has started the Green Belt Movement. “We wanted to emphasize that by cutting trees, removing vegetation, having this soil erosion, we were literally stripping the Earth of its color,” she remarks.
Wangari comes from a sacred spot for all of mankind; the rural village she was born in is beside the Great Rift Valley, the birthplace of the first humans who walked upright. Many call Wangari’s home the cradle of life. Early on, she was instructed by her mother about the importance and sanctity of land and that which grows upon it, especially trees. In 1960, she left her village and took a scholarship offered to Kenyans by the United States. She found higher education to be very much her bailiwick, receiving a master of science from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate from the University of Nairobi, the first woman ever to do so. She then went on to rack up a number of other firsts in her homeland, including becoming the University of Nairobi’s first female professor, first department chair, and first woman in the anatomy department.
Even though she enjoyed a happy marriage to a member of Kenya’s Parliament, had a thriving career, and was raising three children, she still found time to become involved with women’s rights. Her Kikuyu background was different from the district in Nairobi her husband was assigned to. As a Kikuyu woman, Wangari had been free to express her opinions and be actively involved in village affairs. In Nairobi, she was regarded as much too uppity for her own good. Proving them right, Wangari decided to run for Parliament and quit her job at the university to work full-time on her campaign. When she was told she was ineligible to run for Parliament because she was a woman, the university refused to hire her back.
Wangari then turned her prodigious energy to the environment. On World Environment Day in 1977, she and her supporters planted seven trees in a public park and laid the foundation for the Green Belt movement. Put down by many, and even beaten with clubs, she was accused of throwing her education and talent away. This time, she proved everybody wrong. Wangari discovered that only 3 percent of the Kenyan forest was still standing. As a result, Kenyan villagers were suffering malnutrition, erosion of their farmland, and the subsequent loss of water as springs and creeks dried up. She quite accurately foresaw famine and environmental disaster unless trees were again planted to restore the environment to its natural state. Wangari traveled throughout Kenya, teaching village women how to plant trees and how to start them from seeds they collected. Soon children got involved in the Green Belt planting projects, and by 1988, more than 10,000 trees were planted.
Wangari’s brilliant strategy is simple. She doesn’t try to convert villagers to the program. She waits for word of the good work and practical results to spread and, soon enough, the Green Belters are asked to come to another area. In addition to helping to stem the tide of complete destruction of Kenya’s ecosystem, Wangari’s Green Belt movement has provided many economic opportunities for Kenya’s women.
Over the years, Wangari Maathai has received greater recognition for founding the Green Belt movement than any parliamentary seat would have provided. She has received many awards, become a Nobel Laureate, received a “Woman of the World” award from Diana, Princess of Wales, and the encouragement to continue her invaluable work in the regreening of Africa’s precious heartland.
“One person can make the difference.”
— Wangari Maathai
Tree-Huggers Unite!
The Chipko movement in India began in 1973 when a group of Indian women protested a government action to log near their village. When the loggers decided on a different spot, the women went there to stop the tree-cutting. In a country where widows are still burned with their dead husbands in some places, this concerted action is truly courageous. A year later, the tree action moved to yet another location. Gaura Devi, a respected elder and widow from the village of Reni, was tipped off by a little girl herding cows that loggers were on the way. Gaura flew into action and got a troop of women. When a logger threatened Devi with a gun, she replied with a fierce calm, “Shoot us. Only then will you be able to cut down the forest.” From this point on, the strength of the Chipko movement increased tremendously and even got requests from men to join. Chipko means “to hug;” these grassroots environmentalists encircle their trees, holding hands to protecting their fellow beings from destruction.
Judi Bari: Shero of the Forest Movement
The day after Judi Bari died, someone wearing an Earth First! t-shirt lowered the Willits Post Office Flag to half-mast. The flag stayed grieving until the postmaster put it back up some time later. The postmaster had to do a lot of raising the flag that week because every day the flag was lowered until the day of her wake, when the city hall flag stayed at half-mast for the day.
Judi was loved because she was an inspiration; she was admired and vilified because she was a great organizer. She knew how to organize all kinds of people—hippie kids to homesteaders—into an alliance that, by 1991, was beginning to include loggers and other timber workers. And for this she was bombed. She has the astute sense when to invoke the neighborhood and when not to. And for this she was bombed. She had the principled courage to stand in the face of macho Earth First!-ers and renounce tree-spiking; and she continued to do this in spite of being crippled and in chronic, unrepairable pain for the last six years of her life.
Here was the shero’s journey: to achieve the respect and honor due her work from loggers and other timber workers. Loggers who were tired of slogging right and left to cut baby trees to make a living; millworkers who saw that the company didn’t care for them any more than it cared for the forest. She brought them to understand that the company was cutting them out of a job; she was good at pointing out that putting the quarterly report before the health of the forest would destroy it for our children. And workers were beginning to understand her message; and “Big Timber” couldn’t stand that kind of message, so she was bombed. By somebody who is still out there.
A veritable army of people, whose desire to vilify Judi seemed endless, was led by the FBI, which labeled her a terrorist, charged her with bombing herself, and accused her one month before her death of faking cancer to gain sympathy from the public. Why on earth, why? I believe it was because she espoused and lived by a philosophy she called “biocentrism,” which holds that humankind as a species is only one of a continuum, an organism, and therefore had little right to exploit the resources of the planet to the resources’ destruction. She believed that giant corporations were betraying the public trust by the extraction of resources for obscene profit; naturally, this was appalling to those guardians of corporate America. So, if bombers could not destroy her body, then the FBI would destroy her reputation. If she could not be stopped from forming an alliance with workers, then she could be slowed down by intimidation, threats, isolation, and misinformation. It didn’t work; she came back, and never stopped until cancer struck her down six years after the bombing.
That was her sheroism. She challenged all kinds of macho forces on their own ground. When Louisiana-Pacific Security shoved her to the ground and conned the cops into arresting her falsely, she replied a few days later by leading a circle of women through their gate at Albion, surrounded the security officer while chanting the many names of the Great Goddess. “My God, they’ve cast a spell on me!” he cried, eyes rolling back into his head. When in the process of discovery she obtained Oakland Police Department photos of her bombing, she looked at them over and over until she could harden herself to reliving the trauma, and actively conduct her case against the FBI for harassment, slander, and other equally slimy machinations conducted by their COINTELPRO program.
Judi inspired many of us to embrace Earth First! principles, because she lived and worked by those principles and the principles of nonviolent direct action. She inspired us to learn the principles of forest management from all sides. She saw clearly and led us to see that the trust of honest men, who believed the forest would still be there for their children the way it had been for them, had been betrayed and broken by the giant corporations. She inspired us to work to save the trees of our backyards, stretching through northern California to the Oregon border and beyond: the Cascades, the Siskiyous, the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, Clayoquot Sound, clearcut after clearcut all the way to the Brooks Range.
Six years—the last years of her life—of relentless organizing true to her shero’s mission, cleaning up the corporate Augean Stables as if the corporate steeds were eating and eliminating the world. She never gave up, and she never lost her laugh. Great, deep, holding all the world laughter, even through the pain of her last months. She was cut off too soon—way too soon. What the bombing didn’t do, breast cancer—the women’s neutron bomb—did. Judi made the sheroic decision to die with dignity, surrounded by her children, her family, and her friends. In the months left to her after the 1996 Headwaters Rally, the greatest mass civil disobedience in the history of the U.S. forest movement (1,033 arrests that day; over 200 actions in the months following) she organized, explained, and delegated the mountains of material she had amassed: from the stuff for making banners (her last hangs on the Skunk Train Line proclaiming L-P OUT! and it’s coming true) to extensive files on her case against the FBI.
In that time, she also had the opportunity to see how much the hometown folks loved her. There was a benefit tribute a month before she died. Judi was there and took the time to express her joy and thanks by singing, “I am a warrior of the earth; I came alive in the Ancient Redwoods,” clutching all the while a bottle of Headwaters water, and, lastly, toking a bit of medical marijuana and blowing it into the Willits High School Auditorium air. “I’ve liberated Willits High!” she cried, and as we cheered and cried and howled to see that ephemeral smoke ascend the shaft of the spotlight, we knew we would never be the same for knowing her, having seen the Spirit pass among us once more with her great belly laugh. Viva Judi! Presente Siempre.
“The woman brave enough to sit in the crotch of a tree had hers blown up today.”
— Robin Rule, on the bombing of Judi Bari
