"Root Causes: An Interview with Wangari Maathai"

What made Maathai's movement remarkable, and would eventually attract the attention of the Nobel committee, was how it erased the distinctions between environmentalism, feminism, democratization, and human rights advocacy. Maathai saw a direct connection between problems such as deforestation and soil erosion and the failures of Kenya’s one-party state. "I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship," she says. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, she boldly confronted the country's ruling party and its autocratic president, Daniel Arap Moi. In their most visible showdown, Maathai led a successful campaign against Moi's plan to build a 62-story party headquarters, complete with a larger-than-life statue of himself, in Nairobi's Uhuru Park.

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