Green Belt Movement

Context

In the mid 1970s, Kenyan women reported that their streams were drying up, their food supply was less secure, and they had to walk increasingly far to gather firewood for fuel and fencing. This climate impact affected their social and economic livelihood, placing pressure on women for the reproductive labour of growing, harvesting, and cooking food, raising children, and caring for families.

Practice

In 1977 the Kenyan environmentalist and political campaigner Wangari Maathai, along with six other women, founded the Green Belt Movement (GBM).¹Maathai was the first African woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for her work with this Movement. She also held several seats in government, and today, an annual day dedicated to her legacy continues to focus on climate justice action in East Africa and beyond. GBM is a charity that organises forestry projects and employs women to plant and manage woodlands used for their own communities’ food and firewood needs. Protecting the environment from industrial forestry, and improving livelihoods by directly employing women, GBM continues to this day, and has planted over 30 million trees, mostly in Kenya but also in several other African nations.²Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 129. GBM also oversees the construction and repair of water towers and irrigation systems, facilitates training for entrepreneurial activities such as goat farming, and campaigns against new construction projects such as a highway between Narobi airport and a region of wetlands. In these combined ecological and political actions, GMB resists export patterns and encourages a localised economy to serve and secure the immediate community.

The GBM movement is exemplary in understanding equity along economic and ecological axes, with the needs of the planet closely aligned with the needs of the people depending on its lands and waters. Such an integrated understanding of planetary and human needs chimes with recent economic theories such as Doughnut Economics.³Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017). GBM’s emphasis on women’s reproductive labour, meanwhile, resonates with material feminist and ecofeminist arguments that have called for gender equity when discussing economic output so that women’s labours cannot be exploited and rendered invisible in GDP.⁴For example, see Marilyn Waring. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). As the climate emergency worsens, movements like GBM, Zenab for Women in Development, and Women Environment Programme Nigeria grow in importance as grassroots activations of eco-intersectional justice.

Notes

• 1
  Maathai was the first African woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for her work with this Movement. She also held several seats in government, and today, an annual day dedicated to her legacy continues to focus on climate justice action in East Africa and beyond.
• 2
  Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 129.
• 3
  Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017).
• 4
  For example, see Marilyn Waring. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).