She planted trees and won the Nobel Prize

Kenyan Green Activist Wins Nobel Peace Prize
Reuters

Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, honored for her work planting tens of millions of trees to save the environment. The award marks a new theme in interpreting the 1895 will of Sweden's Alfred Nobel, who founded the prize.

"Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment," the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, said of the prize.

Maathai was a surprise winner of the award, worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.36 million), from a record field of 194 candidates.

"We have added a new dimension to the concept of peace," Mjoes said. "We have emphasized the environment, democracy building and human rights and especially women's rights.

Maathai's Green Belt Movement, comprised mainly of women, says it has planted about 30 million trees across Africa to combat deforestation that often deepens poverty.

"I am absolutely overwhelmed," she said. The award will be handed out in Oslo on December 10.

Maathai said that her grassroots movement could be a pre-emptive strike to safeguard peace.

"Many wars in the world are actually fought over natural resources," she told Norway's NRK radio. "In managing our resources ... we plant the seeds of peace, both now and in the future."

Tree plantings slow desertification, preserve forest habitats for wildlife and provide a source of fuel, building materials and food for future generations.

Trees also soak up carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. Many environmental experts say that global warming could be the biggest threat to life on the planet in coming decades, with more deserts, floods and rising sea levels.

Maathai, born in 1940, is a zoology professor who rose to international fame for campaigns against government-backed forest clearances in Kenya in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Maathai is the 12th woman peace laureate since the first award was made in 1901. The last African laureate was U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, of Ghana, in 2001.

Experts estimate British colonialists and Kenyan farmers have cleared about 75 percent of woodlands in the last 150 years, leaving two percent of Kenya's land under forest cover.

In 1989 Maathai's protests forced then President Daniel arap Moi to abandon a personal plan to erect a 62-storey office tower in a Nairobi park. In 1999 she was beaten and whipped by private security guards during a demonstration against the sale of forest land near the capital Nairobi.

She has also been teargassed and clubbed unconscious by police, threatened with death by anonymous phone callers, and was once thrown into jail overnight for leading protests.