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I think that for anybody who has worked in the civil society, government bureaucracy moves very very slowly.

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
Think
Moves
Thinking
Slowly
Civil
Worked
Anybody
Society
Moving
Government
Bureaucracy

More quotes by Wangari Maathai

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It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture.
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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.
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I would like to call on young people to commit themselves to activities that contribute toward achieving their long-term dreams. They have the energy and creativity to shape a sustainable future. To the young people I say, you are a gift to your communities and indeed the world. You are our hope and our future.
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There are opportunities even in the most difficult moments.
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Sometimes I feel frustration at the bureaucracy for not moving fast enough to deliver in the way that I would prefer. But that is probably because I have worked for many years in the civil society, which tends to move much faster than government.
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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.
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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.
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I don't believe [Africa] is ready to shift - and she needs to shift. So she needs to get the technology and she can only get that technology from the developed world.
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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.
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We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty and send children to school and provide health.
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We all share one planet and are one hummanity, there is no escaping this reality.
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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
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First of all, farmers should work with universities and research institutions in the country, and hopefully with the government.
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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.
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We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind.
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All through the ages the African people have made efforts to deliver themselves from oppressive forces.
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Quite often when you help poor people, they don't think about the environment. They think about survival.
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It is wonderful when you don't have the fear, and a lot of the time I don't ... I focus on what needs to be done instead.
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It gradually became clear that the Green Belt Movement's work with communities to repair the degraded environment could not be done effectively without participants embracing a set of core spiritual values.
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Obviously the world is moving away from high carbon energy to low carbon energy, and eventually moving away toward renewable energy. So it is in the interest of Africa to move towards that, because that's where the world is moving.
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