Wangari Maathai Essay

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Wangari Maathai Throughout history many people have devoted their life to promoting and protecting people’s human rights. One of whom was Wangari Maathai. She devoted her life towards bettering the environment of her native land, Kenya. Maathai was an environmentalist who developed the Greenbelt Movement. She was also known as a women’s rights advocate and she received many awards. The work that Wangari Muta Maathai did is very important to lean about. She was a Kenyan environmental and political activist. Maathai was educated in the U.S at Mount St. Scholastics and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya. She continued to teach at Nairobi, becoming a senior lecturer in anatomy in 1974, chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy in 1976 and associate professor in 1977. Wangari was the first woman in Nairobi appointed to any of these positions. She campaigned for equal benefits for the women working on the staff of the university, going so far as to attempt to turn the academic staff association of the university into a union, in order to negotiate for benefits. Wangari’s work has and is affecting lots of people or to be more specific the whole world .At first Wangari Muta Maathai’s work took the form of an informal employment agency, finding jobs for the very poor in the houses of the well-off. She began to focus on the circle that links poverty, hunger, environmental collapse and women’s status. Wangari Maathai saw how in poor families women scavenged for firewood to cook, eventually wandering further and further from home to find it. As more and more trees are felled, soil erosion leads to desertification; fewer cooked meals, meanwhile, results in malnutrition. She devised a simple plan, and, more importantly, she carried it out. Her grand scheme? Plant trees. She convinced the National Council of the Women of

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