Home > About Us > Board of Directors > Betty Hatch > Betty with Wangari Muta Maathai

Wangari Muta Maathai? She plants trees. She has been arrested many times, imprisoned, and even beaten unconscious for doing it (upsetting big business’s plans to raze more land). In 1977, she planted nine trees in her backyard and founded a movement. Since then, more than 100,000 women in Kenya and other African countries have joined her Green Belt Movement to stop soil erosion and to provide themselves with wood for cooking fires. They have planted 30 million trees so far. When Maathai, 64, leaned last October that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize, she went to the foot of Mount Kenya and planted a tree.

In the 1980s her husband left her and their three children, divorcing her on the grounds that she was “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control.” She is thrillingly well-educated, strong, successful, unbowed, and free. She was the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a Ph.D., the first woman head of a university department in Kenya, and the first African woman to win the Peace Prize. But her lasting gift to us all is not some pioneering feat that none could replicate. It is the inspiration to do just one world-saving, beautifying, ancient, simple thing.

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