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Replenishing the Earth

Maathai’s Holistic Environmentalism

This chapter focuses on Wangari Maathai’s critical thoughts and philosophies on the subject of environmental conservation, articulated in Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (2010) and The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2003) as well as her lectures, speeches, articles, interviews, and activist exercises. I abstract from these a conceptualization of holistic environmentalism that offers a path to sustainable environmental (re)production, protection, and justice, which serves as a path to other forms of social justice. Maathai’s critical ideas analyzed in the four sections of this chapter exemplify her trademark holistic environmentalism that is rooted in radical utu. The first and second sections systemize what she considered the necessary jumping-off point for any efforts at environmental defense work: an understanding of and appreciation for the state of the environment. As she reasoned, “The immediate response to the crisis is the rainfall has not come. ‘The rains did not come.’ But very few of us ask, ‘Why didn’t the rains come?’ That’s the challenge. We need to ask ourselves, and that’s why we’re being challenged to think holistically” (Maathai 2005b). Maathai suggested that the practice of holistic environmentalism requires approaches based on a comprehensive understanding of specific environments, and this demands a shift in outlooks and approaches in the study of ecologies. In the first section, I cover the lenses and perspectives she proposed for reading environments and the entities and interactions within those environments. These perspectives would be incomplete without historicizing localized states of environments, as I demonstrate in the second section, using Maathai’s analysis of Kenya’s environmental history.

Proficiency and familiarity with the state of the environment informs the development of critical approaches for investigating environmental issues and environmentalism as well as appropriate and effective models for practical conservationism. In sections three and four, I present the processes that follow the acquisition of the insights identified above—that is, the definition of environmentalist knowledge construction and activist models. The principles articulated in Maathai’s work and delineated in these sections endorse the designing of approaches for environmentalism, which serve both the physical world and the human beings residing in it. Apposite and well-directed conservationism, for Maathai, was difficult to achieve without clear foundational values and ideals. The frameworks that emerge from this examination of her work and words center the ideal that environmental management exists in synergetic relationships with other processes and realities, including peace, security, health, capacity building, and poverty reduction. It is through this filter that she conceptualized conservation, environmental justice, and ecological security not only as bound to but also as a route to ensuring other types of security, including food, human, and national.

Translation of these ideas and ideals into active radical environmentalism is made possible by the processes and frameworks described. Maathai named environmental protection and replenishing as political acts, conceptualizing the act of planting trees as a symbol of defiance (Maathai 2006). Teasing out this idea, I complete the chapter by focalizing applications of Maathai’s critical thoughts and values toward activating what I call utu-driven eco-revolutions.

Utu and Cognizing Environments

Desmond Tutu deciphers, “Africa is the birthplace of ubuntu, the ancient spirituality of humanity, oneness with our creator, the other, and nature. Together with humanity’s team, I dream of a new world and a new humanity—a humanity that expresses ubuntu. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—I am because we are. We are all one” (2012). Per this definition, the human condition and the condition of being human are intimately connected to humans’ relationship with their environment. Maathai’s holistic environmentalism is inseparable from utu. She said, “Human beings have a consciousness by which we can appreciate love, beauty, creativity, and innovation or mourn the lack thereof. To the extent that we can go beyond ourselves and ordinary biological instincts, we experience what it means to be human and therefore different from other forms of life” (Maathai 2010a, 17). Maathai offered a deeper environmental dimension to the beingness of the human, arguing, “In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves and all humankind” (17). To wit, we lose some of our humanity, with damage happening at physical, psychological, and spiritual levels when our environment is mutilated. This stresses the criticality of human beings appreciating the coadjuvant nature of their relationship with the environment so they can develop appropriate ways of interacting with that environment. Such development and awareness can only nurture and further heighten their humanness—their utu.

Maathai defined and situated “the source,” ever present in the environment, as a place of knowledge and awareness, which should inform how human beings as individuals and collectives interact with their environments (Maathai 2010, 21–22). In this conceptualization, the association between the environment and the human is sacred and symbiotic. In Maathai’s view, “if we can’t or won’t assist in the earth’s healing process, the planet might not take care of us either” (24). In the books Replenishing the Earth, Unbowed: A Memoir (2007), and The Challenge for Africa (2009), she stressed that the relationship between humans and their environment, across cultures, has always had deeply spiritual dimensions. Thus, interfaces with nature provide symbiotic healing on two levels and connect human beings to their physical and spiritual selves, whatever they define those to be, and, as a consequence, their humanity and all humanity. According to Maathai, for environmental and human rescue to be activated, individuals must meet their responsibility to their environments for themselves, their communities, and future generations locally and globally. Maathai’s philosophy of environmentalism, therefore, is rooted in a universal utu (Maathai 2010a, 16–17), which triggers and sustains holistic thinking. Below, I outline the changes in perspectives she conceptualized to inform this way of being and knowing.

Maathai proposed a tridimensional approach to understanding the environment, which combined application of the big-picture perspective (thinking universally) and the long-view perspective (considering the environment over time), working in tandem with a consideration for the small and the local. She rationalized the big-picture perspective’s capacity to “open up deeper inquiries as to our relationship to the planet, and force us to ask questions about our attitude toward it and activities upon it—questions that, in the rush of our day-to-day lives, where we do not see our effect on the whole, we may not be able to grasp the significance of” (Maathai 2010a, 61). Maathai was quick to elaborate that the big picture can be realized at different layers beyond the individual space and person, from one’s local space to the earth as a whole. The long view’s vertical perspective of space and horizontal perspective of time “offer only more wonder and astonishment: at the magnitude of created existence, and the awesome responsibility we humans have in not only comprehending it, but protecting what we can” (64).

Losing sight of the big picture and the long view has had significant ramifications (Maathai 2010a, 64–67). Maathai described a dissonance in experiential understanding across generations, which compromises possibilities for collective action to save the environment as well as cross-generational passing-on of environmental knowledge and history. Using the example of central Kenya, she observed that her generation was able to recognize the degradation that had occurred to the environment with the loss of the thick forests and functioning waterways and the ecosystems they supported. On the other hand, to the youth, the dense tea and coffee plantations signal healthy, thriving environments—this is the central Kenya of their lifelong experience, and so even the drying streams are acceptable as part of this backdrop because this has always been the limit of their experience with their environment (64–65). Failing to recognize the big-picture and long-view perspectives also causes short memories in relation to changing environmental conditions. For example, after long, devastating droughts, as soon as the rains fall, communities appear to have collective amnesia about the drought, and so little effort is put toward preventing a recurrence. This leads to another consequence of not operationalizing these perspectives, which is that human beings are caught in a cycle of reacting to crises and fail to correct the root causes of the crises for long-term benefits. Applying these two perspectives develops shared consciousness for individuals and appreciation for how their actions affect their immediate environment as well as the global one, and other human beings, further activating their utu.

Maathai clarified that while the big- and long-view perspectives direct us toward effective far-reaching solutions and concrete practices, it is equally important to focus on the small perspective (Maathai 2010a, 67). In considering “the small,” her call was not just for people to focus on their immediate environments in a general sense but also the individual parts that make up those ecosystems. It is necessary to consider the particularities and with that the interconnectedness of the parts of the small as well as of one small ecosystem to another. Maathai said, “It is also an infinitely subtle and intricate network of biomes that are full of microorganisms, bacteria, insects, plants, and other forms of life that are the bedrock of the larger ecosystems on which . . . more consumptive species such as our own depend” (68). She elaborated, saying, “Part of acknowledging the small and its connectedness is simply in noticing individual distress and the chain reaction it could stimulate” (69). Like the big picture, the small exists on different scales. A stream or pond is small in relation to the stretch of land on which it exists, which in turn is small in relation to the village. The village is small in relation to a district, which then scales up to a county, a country, and so on.

Seeing the big and small picture forces humans to become aware of the sources of things, which allows them to experience more of their humanness. Recognizing the sources of things provides an understanding of the interconnected needs and contributions of different components of ecosystems. Maathai, citing James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, promoted the idea of seeing the earth as one self-sustaining organism, with human beings as just one part of what makes up that organism (Maathai 2010a, 61–64). Being a part of an organism indicates that their true nature, humanness, is locked into how the rest of the body performs. Indeed, to disrespect or degrade the organism is to do the same to the self.

With the erasure of respect for the sources of things, human beings have constructed a false reality and belief in their absolute dominion over nature (Maathai 2010a, 71–73). Maathai shed light on how this misstep has compromised the capacity of human beings to appreciate their dependency on their environments and so interrupted their efforts to preserve those ecosystems. Underscoring human beings’ vulnerability and dependency on the other parts of the organism that is the earth, she wrote, “It is a sobering thought that if the human species were to become extinct, no species I know of would die out because we were not there to sustain them. Yet if some of them became extinct, human beings would also die out. That should encourage us to have respect for the other forms of life and indeed for all of creation. We should demonstrate our gratitude for the way they sustain us” (2010a, 71). Recognizing this susceptibility humanizes the human in enhanced ways and also underlines human beings’ communion and their reliance on each other and on nature, the essence of the philosophy of utu.

Applying these three perspectives, Maathai located human beings as occupying the summit as well as the base of the pyramid—in other words, as the ones most likely to influence trends of nature and maximize usage from their environments but also as the most vulnerable entities within their ecosystems. A close reading and analysis of this position reveals an unstated proposition that locates humans in relation to the need to protect the environment. She called for a continued quest for biological and other forms of knowledge about the environment (Maathai 2010a, 73–75), explaining that even science has barely cracked the surface of all there is to know about the environment. Clear in this position is not just a sense of wonder about the environment and a rationalization for further studies of the environment but also, more significantly, the lesson that it is too early to dismantle the environment or to reengineer it. If in fact human beings have a limited understanding of the environment, they cannot fully comprehend the ramifications of destroying it. Thus, it would be suicidal to destroy or reengineer the environment because there is no full understanding of it that would support its re-creation should the need arise. Additionally, failure to fully understand the environment and its ecosystems is hampering humans’ understanding not just of their world but also of themselves and their capacities as part of that organism. Thus, as highest located and also most vulnerable, the human being does in fact have the greatest stake in seeing the environment protected and should bear the biggest burden in ensuring its defense.

In summary, Maathai suggested that human beings should be on a constant quest for knowledge about their environments in order to manage it justly and sustainably and also so they can fully access their own humanness. Meeting this task requires changes in attitudes and perspectives in time and space as well as thought. This should be reflected in how we relate to the environment, paying simultaneous attention to the longer view, the broader picture, and the small details and entities (Maathai 2010a, 67). She wrote, “The task for us in healing the Earth’s wounds is to find a balance between the vertical and horizontal views; the big picture and the small; between knowledge based on measurement and data, and knowledge that draws on older forms of wisdom and experience” (76). The knowledge acquired through balancing multiple perspectives will inform the definition of holistic approaches.

To fully master this relationship to the environment requires contextualized analysis of the root causes of existing environmental conditions, which helps human beings learn from their pasts in designing futures. In the next section, I engage with Maathai’s analysis of Kenya’s environmental history to illustrate this idea. This history also offers further insight into how mismanaging the environment degrades humanity and humanness for both the destroyers and those affected by the destruction.

Denaturing the Environment: The Case of Kenya

For Maathai, environmental degradation and its effects on the continent of Africa were merely the symptoms of something more substantial, and so any real remedy required a consideration of the root causes. Growing into adulthood, she observed the depletion of the lush greenery and streams of her childhood days and later, as a scientist, understood this as a function of human interference (Maathai 2006). In response, Maathai promoted the idea of focusing on the triggers of disempowerment, poverty, lack of water, failing food security, poor health, and general letdowns, among other challenges (Maathai 2007a, 173; Maathai 2009b, 5). As part of this reflection, Maathai placed some responsibility at the feet of the citizens. Largely, however, she recognized that the environmental degradation was caused by external forces (Maathai 2007a, 173), observing that large-scale destruction of forests was not the work of the often-marginalized people who lived near them (Maathai 2010a, 38–55). The impoverished people who lived around forests, marginalized from control of the operations of modernity, were not the ones destroying forests (Maathai 2000, 41). They were just the ones most affected. Maathai pointed a finger at governments and companies as well as individuals such as poachers, conservationists, and tourists, many of them foreigners controlling and profiting from African lands and resources (Maathai 2009b, 229–33).

In Kenya, environmental degradation has affected rain cycles and agricultural and livestock production and caused a lack of basic day-to-day requirements such as food, firewood, and indigenous medicines for many. Kenyans experience consequences of this economically, politically and socially. In explaining why responsiveness to the root causes should inform approaches and philosophies of activism and critical thinking on the subject, Maathai distinguished an always-present connection of the human being to the land. She communicated the importance of sustaining that balance in her lecture “Bottlenecks to Development in Africa,” drawing attention to indigenous African societies where food security was safeguarded at both the family and communal level and relating this to communities’ day-to-day communion with their environments (Maathai 1995a). She spoke of the world of her childhood, where stabilized seasons and sustainable cultures of food production, processing, usage, storage, and distribution steadied food security and good health for not just the people but the physical environment as well. This picture is of an ecosystem in balance, with all the parts of the whole complementing and supporting each other, a reality that is necessary for the social, economic, and physical health and security of communities.

Having experienced this equilibrium, Maathai sought to pinpoint the source of environmental imbalances and related phenomena experienced in contemporary Kenya and indeed the rest of Africa (Maathai 2006). In an interview with Marianne Schnall (Maathai 2009d), she shared her journey, which began with rural women she encountered in her work. As she was confronted by their narratives expressing basic needs, including water, firewood, income, medicine, and food, she realized they were describing the failure of the environment to sustain them. Critically, she recognized these conditions as symptoms of larger systemic and structural root causes. Specifically, she traced their origins to the scourge of colonialism. Highlighting, like other decolonial thinkers, the impact of colonialism, racism, and capitalism, Maathai particularized the effects of this negative side of modernity to the question of the environment (Maathai 2009b, 233–34). To sustainably address the root causes of environment-attendant issues of underdevelopment, she argued, necessitated an interrogation of the exploitation perpetrated mostly by representatives of the Global North and their allies, spaces they plundered for profit and political control, and their culpability and responsibility (Maathai 1995a; Taking Root 2008). This was an exercise she undertook in relation to Kenya.

Out of the profit-obsessed colonial cosmos was born a culture of pillaging the environment without any concern for replenishing it. This happened through a deliberate process. To control the land, it was necessary for the colonialists to estrange the people from it. The capitalist and neoliberal ideologies and exercises of colonialism and, later, neocolonialism separated the people from the land, severing the communion that Maathai saw as essential to the survival of both. The expropriation of native land through the 1902 Crown Lands Ordinance stole from the people a personal stake in the land and erased their direct relationships to specific parcels of ancestral land. They became tenants on their own land, which was now owned by the Crown. Further erasure of ownership occurred when the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance made possible ninety-nine-year leases for settlers (Onyango, Swallow, and Meinzen-Dick 2005, 5; Home 2012, 189–90). The institution of title deeds blatantly appropriated land from rightful owners, even erasing ancestral claims to it (Maathai 2010a, 227), and the creation of native reserves furthered this estrangement. As a consequence of colonialism and this alienation of colonial subjects from their land, a process of dehumanizing was actuated. Along with losing their land, they also experienced a reassignment of identities and ranks in this new societal order, what Maathai outlined as a form of eco-racism (Maathai 2007a).

As Africans lost their relationship to the land and their environment, their homes were destroyed, their land was appropriated, and forests they treasured for spiritual and other reasons were cut down to build residential native reserves (Maathai 2007a, 62; Taking Root 2008). In the reserves, created as a domicile for the displaced Africans, limited access to land and overpopulation resulted in a shortage of food and other resources (Kanyinga 2009, 327; Maathai 2007a, 67). At the same time, people were forced to migrate to find work for their survival, intensifying the disconnection from the land. The introduction of taxes forced native Kenyans to give up subsistence farming to seek wage labor. The human beings’ relationship to the land was now redefined and corrupted by pressing financial needs and responsibilities. First, land was taken away. Second, the symbiotic relationship of care and use between the human and the land was obliterated. Third, the large numbers of people on small pieces of reserve land and departure from practices that had protected the land for centuries exhausted the land’s productivity and quickly fatigued the soil. Fourth, the dehumanizing regulation of the movements of native Kenyans through the kipande identification system (Home 2012, 179) and the control of their labor affected how and where they worked the land (Kanyinga 2009, 328). The demands of colonialism transferred native Kenyans’ time and labor from caring for their land, if they had any, to caring for someone else’s land—the settlers’—in ways in which the settlers instructed. The new systems forced native Kenyans to farm foreign crop varieties and with methods foreign to their experience.

Maathai experienced this impact of colonialism personally. She grew up in a reality where white settlers who constituted less than 1 percent of the population controlled over 20 percent of Kenya’s prime land, the so-called White Highlands. Hundreds of thousands of native Kenyans, including her family, were forced to live as squatters (Maathai 2007a, 62) and registered as resident native laborers, a system that KAU leaders called “new slavery.” In this environment, the colonial-era introduction of a cash economy and cash-crop economies across Africa initiated threats to food security. The colonial administrators instructed against indigenous farming technologies and systems, representing them as inferior. Along with this were the introduction of monocultural plantations (Maathai 2010, 243–48) and the discarding of indigenous trees and crop cycles.

The colonialists’ interests lay in maximizing profits from their colonies through exploiting agricultural production and other resources across the continent. The commercialization of agriculture through the introduction of cash crops inaugurated a food-purchasing culture as the centrality of indigenous crops was minimized. In various parts of the continent during and after colonialism, in order to survive by making enough money to buy the processed food the new realities forced them to consume, and in order to pay taxes, farmers committed what little productive land had been left under their control to cash crops. This was their way of asserting minimal financial agency in the new economy, which had locked out Africans. In Kenya, they planted crops such as coffee and tea, a practice that was detrimental to the soil (Maathai 2007a, 123). At the same time, indigenous trees fell victim to this profiteering scheme targeting natural resources (122). In the same way that cash crops replaced indigenous crops, fast-growing nonindigenous trees that were good for financial gain, including eucalyptus, black wattle, and conifers, began to replace indigenous forests. Maathai noted that for years this destabilization of indigenous ecosystems unleashed on the continent by some countries of the Global North had inhumanely privileged capitalism at the expense of the people’s subsistence and survival—and their humanity (Maathai 2005b).

The introduction of such trees has been harmful on a number of levels. First, they could not match what the indigenous forests provided to meet the people’s needs. The economics of trees (Maathai 2010a, 86–89), recognizing only the monetary value of trees, hindered people (even scientists) from considering the natural, social, psychological, and ecological services offered by the forests (86). The foreign trees also depleted local biodiversity and drained water resources (Maathai 2005b). These thirsty trees were draining water resources at the same time the land was being cleared of trees that would contribute to rain production to replenish that very reservoir of water the alien trees were exhausting. As an added consequence, indigenous crops that ensured food security were further jeopardized because they could not thrive without water. Even the cash crops introduced in attempts to financially maximize land productivity suffered. In some cases, there was simply an inadequate supply of water. When there was water, crops such as tea, which does not thrive in excessively wet conditions, were destroyed. Even more damning was the fact that loss of soil cover with the clearing of the land led to destructive erosion in parts and affected the production of crops, including those planted for subsistence (Maathai 2005b). Concurrently, manipulating natural environments affected rainfall patterns, which in turn disrupted the predictable planning and cycles of farming.

Along with these conditions, Eurocentric world senses and paradigms of colonialism encouraged the (mis)management of the environment. Eurocentric binary lenses of engaging the world generated hierarchies of bodies and entities, where white was better than black and human was better than nature. The humans could, therefore, manipulate and use their environment in any way that suited their interests. Maathai continually returned to African folktales to illustrate the fallacy of this way of thinking as well as the ills of depersonalizing human connections to natural resources. Such differentiation of entities in an environment breeds a lack of sensitivity to the interconnectedness of the various parts of that cosmos and its ecosystems. Through the colonial, Eurocentric lens, nature was viewed in terms of monetary potential. Trees, for example, simply became timber, and elephants were viewed as a source for ivory (Taking Root