Nobel Laureate for a Greener Planet by Reuters/ Gulf Daily News / IPS News 9:55pm 11th Dec, 2004   11 December 2004 (Reuters)    Nobel Winner Maathai Sounds Alarm Over Planet, by Inger Sethov.    OSLO - Saying the planet is at risk from human activity, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai urged democratic reforms and an end to corporate greed when she collected the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.    Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai shows her in Oslo City Hall December 10, 2004. Saying the planet is at risk from human activity, environmentalist Maathai urged democratic reforms and an end to corporate greed when she collected the Prize on Friday. Photo by Scanpix/Reuters    Maathai, Kenya's deputy environment minister and the first African woman to win the Peace Prize, said sweeping changes were needed to restore a "world of beauty and wonder" by overcoming challenges ranging from AIDS to climate instability.    "Activities that devastate the environment and societies continue unabated," Maathai, founder of a campaign to plant 30 million trees across Africa to slow deforestation, said in an acceptance speech at the ceremony in Oslo City Hall.    "Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system," Maathai, 64, told an audience of about 1,000 people including Norway's King Harald and Queen Sonja.    "I call on leaders, especially in Africa, to expand democratic space and build fair and just societies," she said. "Further, industry and global institutions must appreciate that ensuring economic justice, equity and ecological integrity are of greater value than profits at any cost," she said.    Grassroots citizens' movements should be encouraged. Maathai collected a gold Nobel medal and a diploma to a standing ovation from 1,000 guests. She will separately receive a check for 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.48 million). She will use the cash to expand her Green Belt Movement around the world.    "We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own," she said. The Nobel Prizes were set up in the 1895 will of Swedish philanthropist Alfred Nobel, 10 years before Norway won independence from Sweden. Her tree-planting movement, led mostly by women, aims to produce firewood, building materials and also to slow desertification. It also works for women's rights, democracy and peace.    Maathai said a stream where she used to see frogs and tadpoles as a child 50 years ago had dried up. "The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder," she said. Maathai also said the environment was a barometer of a nation's health. Some critics have said environmentalism has too little to do with peace to warrant the Nobel accolade.    "The state of any country's environment is a reflection of the kind of governance in place, and without good governance there can be no peace," she said.    She said the world was facing a "litany of woes" including corruption, violence against women and children and diseases like AIDS or malaria. In an interview with Reuters, she brushed aside questions about her past suggestions that the deadly AIDS virus might have been the result of a laboratory experiment gone awry. "I really don't know. I really don't have any idea. I'm not an expert in this field," she said. She has also denied suggestions that scientists might have created the virus as a biological weapon against Africans.    Maathai also urged peoples of the world to plant trees at Easter, when Christians believe Christ rose from the dead after being crucified on a wooden cross.    © Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd    December 10, 2004 (Gulf Daily News)    OSLO: Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, who yesterday received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo, said protecting the environment was vital to promote peace and democracy.    "There can be no peace without equitable development and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space. This shift is an idea whose time has come," said Maathai, who is the first environmentalist to receive the prestigious prize.    "Industry and global institutions must appreciate that ensuring economic justice, equity and ecological integrity are of greater value than profits at any cost," she added in her acceptance speech.    Kenya's assistant minister for the environment since 2003, Maathai is the founder of the Green Belt Movement - a campaign to save Africa's forests that began with nine trees in her yard nearly three decades ago, and which has grown into the largest tree planting project in Africa with more than 30 million trees planted across the continent.    Dressed in bright orange with a matching headband, Maathai, 64, accepted the award in the brightly decorated Oslo City Hall, decked with red and purple flowers, from the chairman of the Nobel Committee Ole Mjoes, and in the presence of Norway's King Harald.    In addition to the 10 million Swedish kronor (BD529,200) prize sum, Maathai received a Nobel diploma and gold medal. The committee's decision to award her the coveted prize reflects a new view on peace activism and the extraordinary rise of environmentalism emerging from the wings to the centre stage of politics.    "Environmental protection has become yet another path to peace," Mjoes said. "There are connections between peace on the one hand and an environment on the other in which scarce resources such as oil, water, minerals and timber are quarrelled over," he added, evoking the Arab-Israeli battle over water and the Darfur conflict in Sudan, which he said had largely been provoked by deforestation and desertification in the region.    When the environment is destroyed, plundered or mismanaged, we undermine our quality of life and that of future generations," agreed Maathai, the 12th woman and the first African woman to win the Peace Prize.    "Widespread destruction of ecosystems, especially through deforestation, climatic instability, and contamination in the soils and waters ... all contribute to excruciating poverty," she added.    Maathai, who was the first Kenyan woman to ever win a doctorate degree and the first female professor at the University of Nairobi, also warned that the dilution of traditional culture around the world and especially in Africa was a threat to environmental conservation.    "With the destruction of these cultures and the introduction of new values, local biodiversity is no longer valued or protected and as a result, it is quickly degraded and disappears," she said.    Recalling the beauty of the rural Kenya of her childhood, before she witnessed "forests being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations", Maathai insisted on the importance of giving "back to the children a world of beauty and wonder".    OSLO, Dec 10 (IPS News)    "First African Woman Wins Nobel", by Guri Wiggen. Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, 64, is the first African woman to take the Nobel, and never before has an environmental cause been honoured by the Nobel committee since the prize was first awarded in 1901.    To be the first is nothing new to Maathai; she was the first female to get a doctorate in biology in Eastern and Central Africa in 1964 at the age of 24, and the first female head of a university department in Kenya.    "Although this prize comes to me, it acknowledges the work of countless individuals and groups across the globe," Maathai said in her Nobel lecture given at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in the Oslo City Hall Dec.10. "They work quietly and often without recognition to protect the environment, promote democracy, defend human rights and ensure equality between women and men."    Wangari Maathai's campaign to save Africa's forest began with nine trees in her yard nearly three decades ago. As Kenya's assistant minister for the environment since 2003, she is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, the largest three planting project in Africa, which aims to promote biodiversity, job creation and to give women a stronger identity in society.    "In 1977, when we started the Green belt Movement, I was partly responding to needs identified by rural women, namely lack of firewood, clean drinking water, balanced diets, shelter and income," Maathai said. The Green Belt Movement went on to campaign on education, nutrition and other issues important to women.    "This will be a shift in Africa for all women," Maathai told IPS later. "Females will be encouraged to empower themselves, knowing that the sky is the limit if you really believe in something."    Women have received fewer than one in 20 of all Nobel prizes awarded since 1901.    The Nobel decision is a "breakthrough" for recognizing that environmental issues are related to security, peace and stability, she said. "The environment is very important because when we destroy our resources and they become scarce, we fight over that," she said.    Maathai was elected to the Kenyan parliament as a member of the Mazingira Green Party in December 2002 in the first free elections held in the country in decades. Maathai's award comes after a long and difficult struggle, and that struggle has not been just about the environment and resources. Her opposition to the one-party rule of former president Daniel Arap Moi led to her being jailed, harassed and vilified. She now speaks for all of Africa, not just Kenya. She said other developing countries should promote trade relations with Africa.    "We hope for new thinking about how to carry out development in Africa, so corruption can be fought from both sides, they who give and receive the aid, a new partnership of genuine and adequate trade," she said. "Africa is projected as a continent of non-working-people, and that's not the truth."    This year the Norwegian Nobel Committee has evidently broadened its definition of peace still further. "Environmental protection has become yet another path to peace," committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes said in his lecture at the ceremony.    He too pointed out that natural resources, or the lack of them, can often be a source of conflict.    "Most people would probably agree that there are connections between peace on the one hand and environment on the other in which scarce resources such as oil, water, minerals or timber are quarrelled over. The Middle East is full of dispute relating to oil and water. Competition for minerals has been an important element of several conflicts in Africa in recent years."    Wangari Maathai is the seventh African to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The first African to win the prize was Albert John Lutuli, president of the African National Congress, the South African liberation movement in 1961. Other winners from the continent include UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who shared the prize with the United Nations in 2001, former South African presidents Nelson Mandela and F.W.de Klerk in 1993, Bishop Desmond Tutu of the African Council of Churches in 1984, and Anwar Sadat in 1978.
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