Planting trees to offset your sins is now one of the most hotly-debated topics in the green arena, but here's someone who was doing it long before the jet-setters cottoned on. Hippyshopper editor Abi Silvester presents this week's green female icon: Wangari Maathai.
Hands up who's heard of Wangari Maathai? She's not one of the better known proponents of 'girl power', but she has won a Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering contribution to worldwide sustainable development, democracy and peace, and the chances are you've heard of the Green Belt movement which was founded by Maathai, and has been responsible for the planting of over 30 million trees in Kenya.
This achievement has earnt her the affectionate title 'Tree Woman', but in many ways it's her achievements as a woman that mark Maathai out as a rare talent. Despite growing up in a highly traditional African family in rural Kenya (her father had four wives), she was the first Eastern African woman to be granted a PhD in Veterinary Medicine, and succeeded in becoming head of her faculty at the University of Nairobi.
Later, she became the first African woman to win a Nobel Prize for her work in Kenya with the Green Belt. This programme tackled deforestation, soil erosion and hunger, and was itself largely run by women who were anxious to protect their homeland and ensure their children's future. With Maathai's system in place, these women were able to earn a living doing so.
Life has not been easy for Maathai, who was initially ridiculed by male colleagues for her ambitions, and has been arrested and beaten by the police for her views - most of which concerned not fitting the model of a 'good African woman'. Later, her own husband (the pair divorced in the '80s) was said to have remarked that she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control" and Even her tree planting scheme was once not apprecieated by those whom it helped. But her personality is such that she could only do what in her mind was right, using education as her weapon.
