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You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.
Wangari Maathai
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Wangari Maathai
Age: 71 †
Born: 1940
Born: April 1
Died: 2011
Died: September 25
Biologist
Environmentalist
Political Activist
Politician
Teacher
Veterinarian
Wangari Maathaï
Maathai
Wangari Maathai
People
Protect
Unless
Environment
Help
Understand
Inform
Helping
Empower
Cannot
Empowering
Must
Resources
More quotes by Wangari Maathai
The issue of carbon is one area where we really need to work together and if people don't have the technology they need, that technology needs to be made available and affordable.
Wangari Maathai
It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.
Wangari Maathai
So GMOs, who knows? Maybe GMOs will come, they will get maize that produces double. But who knows what else may happen to the maize?
Wangari Maathai
Disempowerment - whether defined in terms of a lack of self-confidence , apathy, fear, or an inability to take charge of one's own life - is perhaps the most unrecognised problem in Africa today.
Wangari Maathai
We’re constantly being bombarded by problems that we face and sometimes we can get completely overwhelmed. [But] we should always feel like a hummingbird. I may feel insignificant, but I don’t want to be like the other animals watching the planet go down the drain. I’ll be a hummingbird, I’ll do the best I can.
Wangari Maathai
We all share one planet and are one hummanity, there is no escaping this reality.
Wangari Maathai
Yet now the industrialized world is moving away from fossil fuels and moving towards renewable sources of energy. And because we have not invested so much into education, we don't have the technology and sometimes we don't even have the capital to buy this technology.
Wangari Maathai
We need to promote development that does not destroy our environment.
Wangari Maathai
Resources on the planet are limited, and limited resources can come to an end. But there are also a lot of resources that are renewable. A lot of land, for example, can be reclaimed from the encroaching deserts.
Wangari Maathai
But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship.
Wangari Maathai
People are dynamic. They change, and soon as there are enough of you, things change [for a whole society].
Wangari Maathai
There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting.
Wangari Maathai
We do the right thing not to please people but because it's the only logically reasonable thing to do, as long as we are being honest with ourselves - even if we are the only ones.
Wangari Maathai
For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all.
Wangari Maathai
The planet needs trees. If there is indeed that carbon dioxide out there in the atmosphere, the only species on the planet that can actually trap it for us in a natural process of photosynthesis are the trees.
Wangari Maathai
In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families.
Wangari Maathai
I think that for anybody who has worked in the civil society, government bureaucracy moves very very slowly.
Wangari Maathai
What is really important is to educate people how to protect themselves and how to ensure that, despite their poverty, they can get tested and access drugs. So I just hope that those who can will make those drugs available.
Wangari Maathai
The people are starving. They need food they need medicine they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station.
Wangari Maathai
What I am trying to say is that they need to learn to rely on themselves and to learn from other people, and when you learn something from other people, then you keep moving onward for yourself.
Wangari Maathai
