Wangari Maathai
sastyk | September 26, 2011Dr. Wangari Maathai died on Sunday at 71, of ovarian cancer. It is interesting to me that so many of the obituaries get her work wrong - consider what the New York Times says:
Dr. Maathai, one of the most widely respected women on the continent, wore many hats -- environmentalist, feminist, politician, professor, rabble-rouser, human rights advocate and head of the Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977. Its mission was to plant trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.
It is a small error, but an important one. Maathai did not wear many…
sastyk | June 2, 2010I don't plug a lot of movies, mostly because I don't see a lot of movies - I spend so much more time staring a computer screen than I want to, I don't go to the movies often. But I thought I'd have a little blog film festival over the summer, showing bits or trailers of some of the best movies that both show our problems and offer solutions This one, "Taking Root" from 2008, however, is very much worth seeing:
What Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement have accomplished is important the rest of us in a whole host of ways. One of the likely consequences of increasing economic stress…