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Culture defines who we are and how we see ourselves. A new attitude toward nature provides space for a new attitude toward culture and the role it plays in sustainable development
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
Plays
Nature
Role
Play
Toward
Development
Roles
Attitude
Defines
Sustainable
Space
Provides
Culture
More quotes by Wangari Maathai
I think some of these solutions are prepared in an office without a full understanding of the local situation.
Wangari Maathai
Quite often when you help poor people, they don't think about the environment. They think about survival.
Wangari Maathai
When resources are degraded, we start competing for them, whether it is at the local level in Kenya, where we had tribal clashes over land and water, or at the global level, where we are fighting over water, oil, and minerals. So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution of resources.
Wangari Maathai
As long as there is no trust and confidence that there will be justice and fairness in resource distribution, political positioning will remain more important than service
Wangari Maathai
Culture is coded wisdom
Wangari Maathai
If you make mistakes that is alright because we all make mistakes and we learn from those mistakes. You gain confidence from learning, failing and rising again.
Wangari Maathai
I think [GMO] is one area where the is a need for legal regulations to make sure that companies - because at the moment, companies are the ones that have this technology - will not use this technology in a way that could adversely affect the people.
Wangari Maathai
It's the little things citizens do. That's what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees.
Wangari Maathai
One of the reasons why I've written The Challenge for Africa is to save it. Surely there are so many problems we can solve in Africa, but first and foremost, we need a government that feels responsible to protect their own people from the exploitations, from the misuse, from the mistreatment that they can easily get.
Wangari Maathai
I'm sure the government of Qatar is not coming in to grow food for the people of Kenya it's coming to grow food to sell. If it can also sell to the people of Kenya, well, then good. I think that the moves can be helpful, but I think that the history that Africa knows, as I say in my book, has been a history of exploitation.
Wangari Maathai
We cannot tire or give up. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk!
Wangari Maathai
Why do we have to have people come from afar to come and grow food for us, or to grow food to sell to us? It is partly because we are almost becoming used to people doing things for us. Like somebody else is going to solve that problem for us. And that to me is very disempowering system.
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
Do not be naive. AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did it.
Wangari Maathai
Women are responsible for their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve.
Wangari Maathai
Every one of us can make a contribution. And quite often we are looking for the big things and forget that, wherever we are, we can make a contribution. Sometimes I tell myself, I may only be planting a tree here, but just imagine what's happening if there are billions of people out there doing something. Just imagine the power of what we can do.
Wangari Maathai
And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now.
Wangari Maathai
I’m very conscious of the fact that you can’t do it alone. It’s teamwork. When you do it alone you run the risk that when you are no longer there nobody else will do it.
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
We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.
Wangari Maathai