A seedling and a democratic right were, Maathai argued, the same kind of thing. The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, she founded Kenya's Green Belt Movement in 1977 and organized rural women to plant tens of millions of trees — rebuilding watersheds and learning to organize simultaneously. She held that environmental ruin, women's powerlessness, and bad governance were a single knot. President Moi's government beat her, jailed her, and ridiculed her; she continued. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
A group of women stood on a bare Kenyan hillside in the late 1970s, pushing seedlings into dry, eroded ground. They were not scientists or officials. They were farmers who had watched their streams shrink and their firewood vanish. The woman who had gathered them, Wangari Maathai, believed something that sounded almost too simple to matter. If ordinary women planted trees, they could begin to repair both the land and their own power over their lives. The country's rulers did not find it simple at all. Over the next two decades they would call her a madwoman, send police to beat her, and lock her up, because the woman with the seedlings had grasped that a person who can heal a hillside might also decide to question a government.