WANGARI MAATHAI.
Prof.Maathai is an environmentalist who fought her way to a greener Kenya. She fought agains the then Kenyan President and dictator Moi, who wanted to convert Uhuru Park, one of the two only parks in Nairobi into a business centre by contructing a 60-story Kenya Times Media Trust Complex. The plan also included a large statue of the president. She wrote many letters in protest.
She introduced her tree-planting concept to ordinary Kenyan citizens in 1976 and went on to develop it into the Green Belt Movement, a broad-based, grassroots organization whose main focus is helping women’s groups plant trees to conserve the environment and improve quality of life. Through the Green Belt Movement, she now has helped women plant more than 30 million trees on their farms, on schools, and on church compounds.
The Green Belt Movement helps people understand the connection between environmental degradation and a multitude of other issues such as global warming, soil erosion, drought, hunger, poverty.
Its projects empower women, providing them with income, raising their status, and advancing their skills as leaders and organizers.
Its projects empower women, providing them with income, raising their status, and advancing their skills as leaders and organizers.
It has drawn together supporters from across social and economic classes in Kenya and from around the world.
Maathai has excellent leadership qualities. She was able to pool people from various backgrounds to join her course and make their voices heard. In her activitivism, Maathai was persistent, she didnt give up even when the police arrested her and humiliated her and her supporters in public.
"....very important program has been education. Until people understand the linkages between environmental degradation and their own problems, people become trapped, and they feel disempowered, they feel like they can’t do anything, they get overwhelmed by the problems." Maathai.
JAMES LOVELOCK
JAMES LOVELOCK
James Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, a uniquely sensitive device that could detect tiny amounts of pollution.
His theory that the earth is a living inter-related organism proposses that the earth functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. Earth's atmosphere is a mixture of unusual and unstable gases, thus life is a present. Earth's gas is not in chemical equilibrium...but is perfect..The whole system of the climate, the rocks, the air the ocean is a self regulated process. Earth will therefore adjust to activities of man. He sees life as a system. Temperature is regulated on earth by clouds. More clouds lead to more sunlight reflected from the sun, and earth cools, less clouds mean more sunlight reaches the earth, erath warms. If we overwhelm Gaia with our population toxins demand on planets, Gaia will act to bring us back into balance with our planet. Gaia proposes an endless future, for life.
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