Wangari Maathal.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 - Interview

Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She as a controversial choice since she is known more as an environmentalist and a tree planter than as a peace activist.

"This year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has evidently broadened its definition of peace still further," the chair of the committee, Ole Danbolt Mjos, said during the award ceremony in December. "Environmental protection has become yet another path to peace."

"As the first African woman to receive this prize, I accept it on behalf of the people of Kenya and Africa, and indeed the world," Maathai said in her acceptance speech. "I am especially mindful of women and the girl child. I hope it will encourage them to raise their voices and take more space for leadership." She exhorted African leaders to "build fair and just societies," and asked for the release of fellow Nobel laureate Aung Sail Suu Kyi from house arrest in Burma. Maathai also criticized "the extreme global inequities and prevailing consumption patterns" and called on corporations and global institutions to "appreciate that ensuring economic justice, equity, and ecological integrity are of greater value than profits at any cost."

Maathai launched the Green Belt Movement in the 1970s and mobilized Kenyan women to plant trees throughout the country. In the past three decades, that movement has helped plant thirty million trees.

For her work, she faced persecution. Her activism brought her into increasing confrontation with the Kenyan authorities, especially when she began to demand good governance and democratic reform. She was beaten a number of times, including once when the Kenyan police bludgeoned her unconscious. She received death threats, and was forced into hiding in the early 1990s. Seven of her colleagues were killed, and her organization was almost banned. She was repeatedly jailed. "It is dehumanizing," she told The Washington Post of her experiences in prison. "It is filthy. It is crowded. You are put in areas where people will mock you--guards and even prisoners. You are put there to humiliate you."

Her fortunes switched in December 2002, when the reigning regime of Daniel arap Moi was defeated in elections. She won a seat to parliament--with an incredible 98 percent of the vote--and was appointed the assistant minister for the environment, natural resources, and wildlife.

While growing up, Maathai got a lucky break. Her brother persuaded their parents to send her to school, something that was far from the norm for girls in Kenya in the 1940s. She seized the opportunity and was such an exceptional student that the U.S. government gave her a scholarship to study in the United States. She received her bachelor's from Mount St. Scholastica College (currently Benedictine College) in Atchison, Kansas. She went on to get a master's in biology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 and then did doctoral work in Germany. But instead of staying behind in the West, she decided to go back home. She completed her doctorate in veterinary anatomy from the University of Nairobi in 1971, becoming the first East African woman to get a Ph.D., and she taught microanatomy at the university.

Besides the Nobel, she has been awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the Alternative Nobel Prize, and the U.N.'s Africa Prize for Leadership. She currently serves on the board of several international organizations, including the U.N. Secretary General's Advisory Board on Disarmament and the Jane Goodall Institute.

Maathai is full of energy and good cheer and is amazingly nice for someone of her stature. I spoke with her on a March morning in her hotel room at the Alex Hotel in New York City. She sipped tea while she good-naturedly answered my questions. Wearing a bright, multicolored African dress and headscarf, she seemed to still be basking in the afterglow of the Nobel.

The following day, she gave...