Voices of Peace

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On March 8, International Women's Day, I was lucky enough to meet Wangari Maathai, who in 2004 won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the women of the Green Belt Movement (www.greenbeltmovement.org) planting trees in Kenya and elsewhere. She was luminous in blue and silver for this final event after weeks of traveling, about to give her last speech before leaving New York City that night in a wet snowstorm to return to Nairobi. And she was gracious when I felt compelled to brag to her that Utne magazine had covered her work in 1992.

Wangari spoke from the same podium in Manhattan's Cooper Union that Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass spoke from, right down the hall from where Susan B. Anthony had her office and where the NAACP got its start. She is the first environmentalist and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but she believes the significance of this award is farther reaching. She uses the metaphor of the three-legged African stool to explain: One leg is democracy, which encompasses respect for human rights; the second leg is sustainable management of resources and equitable distribution; and the third leg is peace and security. If you're missing any of the legs, you will fall -- and that's true for countries as well as individuals.

'If a clean and healthy environment is a right, you cannot gain this right unless you have a democratic government that respects and acknowledges rights,' she explains. 'If we do not have citizens who acknowledge these rights, and also assume their responsibilities, we're not going to have a clean and good environment. If people struggle over resources, you're going to have conflicts, not peace.'

While waiting to meet Wangari, I chatted with her daughter, Wanjira, and Anna Lappe, co-author with her mother, Frances Moore Lappe, of Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (Tarcher/Putnam, 2002). Frankie Lappe, who wrote Diet for a Small Planet more than 30 years ago and went on to win the Right Livelihood Award, is one of my personal heroines. I saw Anna make her first keynote speech several years ago, to 3,000 people at the Bioneers Conference, and last year Wanjira addressed the same audience. The two of them laughed warmly about the mixed blessing of being involved with the passionate work of their powerful mothers.

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