Interview: Wangari Maathai

  • Wangari Maathai in Kenya in 2004 - the year she won the Nobel Peace Prize. (Photo by Mia MacDonald, courtesy of the Green Belt Movement)

This week, the world’s leaders are
talking about climate change. The
talks are part of ongoing negotiations
on a climate change treaty between the
world’s countries. The hope is for an
agreement in Cophenhagen in December.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner is visting
the United States to talk about the role
of trees in climate change. Wangari
Maathai spoke
with Lester Graham about the importance
of saving the rainforests of the world:

Transcript

This week, the world’s leaders are
talking about climate change. The
talks are part of ongoing negotiations
on a climate change treaty between the
world’s countries. The hope is for an
agreement in Cophenhagen in December.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner is visting
the United States to talk about the role
of trees in climate change. Wangari
Maathai spoke
with Lester Graham about the importance
of saving the rainforests of the world:

Wangari Maathai: Because 20% of the greenhouse gasses, especially carbon, comes from deforestation and forest degradation.

Lester Graham: You know, in the US, it seems the rainforests are so far away – it’s hard to imagine what I can do to have some affect on their future. What can someone like me to do save the rainforest?

Maathai: Even though we live very far from the Amazon, or from the Congo forests, or from the Southeast Asian blocks of forest, these three are the major lands of the planet. They control the climate from very far away. So, the planet is very small when you come to discuss these huge ecosystems.

Graham: But what is it I can do to change things?

Maathai: Well, one thing I think is very, very important – especially here, in North America – when legislators are discussing this issue at Capitol Hill, is to influence your legislator. Convince him or her that dealing with climate change is a very important issue and that it is very important to have legislation that will facilitate this. Because no matter how much we know and recognize the dangers, until our leaders give us legislation around which we can work, it just continues to be talking. And we need this legislation, so I hope citizens will call their leaders.

Graham: What, specifically, can the United States do to save rainforests around the world?

Maathai: Well, I think that one of the agreements that we are hoping will take place in Copenhagen – and America will be part of this – in fact, we hope that America will provide the leadership in Copenhagen – is to agree on a financial mechanism that will help countries that have huge forests – the Amazon, the Congo, the forests in Indonesia and Borneo and that region – that there will be money that will be made available so that these countries will be financially compensated so that they keep these forests standing. Now, if America, the United States of America, if she’s left out – the way she was left out in Kyoto – we can’t go very far. Because, believe me, America – her actions, her attitude – influences the thinking in the world. So I’m hoping that America will provide the leadership and will also contribute towards the financial mechanism that is needed to support forests.

Graham: In your leadership of Green Belt in your native country of Kenya, you’ve used the action of planting a tree as a political statement. In the US, we spend a lot of time talking about using less fossil fuels, but there’s not a lot of talk about planting trees. Are we missing part of the solution?

Maathai: I think it’s very important to encourage farmers, individual citizens to plant trees. And, I’m very happy to know that in some of your states, tree planting has been embraced as one of the solutions. It’s one of the activities that every one of us citizens can do and feel good about it, and teach kids to do it, because every tree will count. And when there are 7 billion of us, almost, in the whole world, so you can imagine, if every one of us planted a tree and made sure that tree survived – can you imagine the impact?

Wangari Maathai won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2004 for her work in
forestry and women’s issues. She spoke
with The Environment Report’s Lester
Graham.

Related Links

Cousteau Family in the Amazon

  • Jean-Michel Cousteau and school children from Iquitos at the Pilpintuwasi Butterfly Farm and Amazon Animal Orphanage, Pilpintuwasi. (Photo by Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society/KQED)

A TV documentary will soon bring the Amazon River
basin to living rooms across the nation. Lester Graham
reports the two-part series looks at how the Amazon
affects climate change for all of us:

Transcript

A TV documentary will soon bring the Amazon River
basin to living rooms across the nation. Lester Graham
reports the two-part series looks at how the Amazon
affects climate change for all of us:

The Amazon and its tributaries make up the largest river system in the world.

(Documentary narrator: “In spite of the enormous scale of this tropical rainforest basin, scientific evidence increasingly has revealed how fragile this ecosystem is. And how what happens here will influence global climate dramatically, possible irreversibly, within the next 10 to 20 years.”)

This two-part program produced by Jean-Michel Cousteau, “Return to the Amazon”,
shows that trees are the key to creating rain in the region and keeping the river alive.

Fifty-percent of moisture for rain in the Amazon is released directly from the trees.
So fewer trees means less rain.

(chainsaw noise)

20% of the Amazon rainforest has already been cut down.

And scientists predict if 30 to 40% of the Amazon forest is cut, it will pass a tipping
point, becoming too dry to survive, and no longer absorbing climate changing carbon
dioxide.

Jose Alvarez Alonso is with the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute. In the
documentary he says illegal logging not only endangers the forest, and the climate, but exploits the
indigenous people: paying them a small bag of sugar to illegally cut down an entire
mahogany tree, and in the process destroying their way of life.

“I can tell you that the mahogany taken out of the Amazon now is stained with
blood.”

Most of the logging is, at least, controversial. Much of it’s corrupt. And, often, it’s illegal. But Brazil still
exports massive amounts of wood.

That’s because people in the U.S. and Europe keep buying the rainforest wood.

In the 25 years since Jean Michel Cousteau last visited the Amazon with his father
Jacques Cousteau, he says there have been some disturbing changes and he
wanted people to see what’s going on. We asked Jean Michel Cousteau what he
hopes people get from the programs.

Cousteau: “Well, I really hope that it will be more than people just having had a good time, discovering a place maybe they didn’t know about, or have heard about but didn’t focus on some of the issues, and some of the solutions, and meet some of the local people. And that beyond all of that, they will take action. I really hope that people will be aware enough to understand the connections that they have, how much we depend upon places like the Amazon for the quality of our lives, every one of us.”

Graham: People who watch programs like yours, they look at these things, and they have one question: ‘Well, what can I do?’ What can an individual do when looking at a big problem like this?

Cousteau: Well, what you can do, there’s a lot you can do. As an individual, by being aware. How can you protect what you don’t understand? So, what we’re offering the public is answers to perhaps some of the questions or to highlight some of the problems. That allows you, as an individual decision maker, to make some better decisions when it comes to the wood you’re going to buy, the next time you look at a piece of furniture, you have the right to ask the question: ‘Is that coming from the rainforest?’

The two-part TV series does outline many of the problems. But, it also offers some
hope as researchers, environmentalists and governments in the Amazon basin work
to solve some of those problems.

For the Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Farmland Increasing Worldwide

The amount of farmland is decreasing throughout the Midwest. But scientists say the amount of agricultural land is increasing worldwide… bringing additional challenges to U.S. farmers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Farmland is disappearing throughout the Midwest, but scientists
say the amount of agricultural land is increasing worldwide… bringing
additional challenges to U.S. farmers. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Researchers have used satellite data and statistics from
government agencies to determine that more than one-third of the
earth’s land is used for agricultural activity.


Scientist Navin Ramankutty is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He says urban sprawl may be gobbling up farmland in the Midwest,
but in places like South America, farms are replacing the rainforest.
Ramankutty says the change concerns U.S. soybean farmers.


“The U.S. still continues to be the largest soybean exporter in the world,
but Brazil’s catching up really fast. So, soybean farmers here in the
Midwest are concerned about whether/how their markets will change
in the future.”


But while the global growth in agriculture is feeding more people,
Ramankutty says there are downsides for the environment in terms of
more water pollution and loss of forests. So, he says his research
team is trying to weigh the tradeoffs, and make recommendations on
what might be the best locations for new farms.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

GAUGING MANKIND’S ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT

In the wake of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, there’s been a lot of talk about how to balance human needs with the health of the planet. Ecologists have been trying to measure the impact of humans on the environment for a number of years, with some sobering results. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Daniel Grossman went to the New York Botanical Garden recently to gauge mankind’s ecological footprint:

Transcript

In the wake of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South
Africa, there’s been a lot of talk about how to balance human needs with the health of the
planet. Ecologists have been trying to measure the impact of humans on the environment
for a number of years, with some sobering results. The Great Lake Radio Consortium’s Daniel Grossman went to the New
York Botanical Garden recently to gauge mankind’s ecological footprint.


[Rain forest sounds, misters, tinkling of water, rain falling on leaves]


To get a good sense of the impact humans are having on earth, you could travel for weeks
on intercontinental plane flights, river boats and desert jeeps. Or, as Columbia University
biologist, Stuart Pimm suggested, visit a botanical garden. There, under the glass and
ironwork of a conservatory, Pimm says you can see a resource that humans are
over-using – Earth’s most important resource, its plant-life.


“We’re sitting in the rain forest here at the New York Botanical Society. And it’s a riot of
green.”


Professor Pimm says here beneath the misters in the Tropical Rain Forest Gallery is a
good place to start a whirlwind tour of Earth’s greenery. The air is heavy with moisture
and sweet-smelling.


“Rain forests are some of the most productive parts of the planet. They grow extremely
quickly and they are therefore generating a lot of biological production.”


What Pimm calls biological production most of us know as plant growth. Biologists say
all this green growth in tropical forests and elsewhere on Earth is the foundation upon
which all life rests.


“Everything in our lives is dependent upon biological productivity – everything that we
eat, everything that our domestic animals eat.”


And everything that every other animal eats as well. In a recent book, Pimm painstakingly
tallies up how much biological productivity we use. He starts with the rain forest. In the
last 50 years, loggers and settlers have cut down 3 million square miles of lush tropical
forests. Much was cut down for subsistence agriculture, a purpose Pimm says it serves
poorly.


“Although the tropical forest looks rich and productive, it is a very special place. And
when you chop that forest down the areas that replace it often become very, very much
less productive.”


[Sound of walking around conservatory]


Pimm speaks of the toll on greenery of cities and roads and of land converted to farming
in temperate regions such as the U.S. Midwest. Then, trekking along the botanical
garden’s gravel paths, he leaves behind the tropical mists and steps into the dry heat of a
Southwestern desert. Deserts and other dry lands are not very productive, but they
account for a substantial fraction of Earth’s land surface. Most of it is grazed by flocks of
sheep, goats, camels and cattle, often causing severe damage to vegetation. When these
uses are added to the other impacts of humanity on earth’s bounty, the results are
surprisingly large.


“What silence has shown is that we are taking 2/5ths of the biological production on land,
a third from the oceans. And that of the world’s fresh water supply, we’re taking half.”


[Fade out sound of conservatory. Fade up sound of Texas frogs.]


[Sound of plane engines]


Frogs and toads croak out a spring mating ritual in a concrete drainage ditch. Nearby, a
pilot practices maneuvers in a small plane occasionally drowning out the amphibian
serenade. Living in culverts, sharing the night with droning engines, these wild animals
are never completely free of human influences. From his Stanford University office,
Professor Peter Vitousek says wherever you look, the din of human activities is
interrupting and crowding out other species. Vitousek made one of the first attempts to
tally the impact of people on plant productivity in 1985.


[Frogs fade out in time for Vitousek’s act]


“The message to me was that we are already having a huge impact on all the other species
because of our use of the production of Earth and the land surface of Earth. That’s not
something that our models predict for some time in the future or something that we’re
guessing at on the basis of fairly weak information. It’s something that we’re clearly
doing now. That’s already happening.”


Many ecologists say this conclusion is beyond doubt. What they can’t say is whether
human domination of so much of nature’s output is good or bad. University of Minnesota
Professor David Tilman says as a member of the human race himself, he appreciates the
comforts in clothing, shelter and food our lifestyles buy us. And he acknowledges that the
survival of our own species is probably not imperiled – at least for the moment – by the
destruction of others. Still, he wonders if someday we’ll regret today’s resource intensive
practices.


“I think the more relevant question to me is, ‘Are we doing this wisely?’ ‘Are we wisely
appropriating the resources of the world?’ So, my concern is that we live in a balanced
way – a way that is sustainable through generations – that we leave our children and
grandchildren the same kind of world that we have.”


An expert on the impacts of agriculture, Tilman says we’re using up more resources than
can be replaced. He says if we don’t grapple with these important issues now, by the time
the human population reaches eight to ten billion or so people later this century, it might
be too difficult for us to do enough to save the planet’s life as we know it today.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Daniel Grossman.

Interview With Mark Plotkin

  • Plotkin is the president of the Amazon Conservation Team, a group working to preserve the cultures and species in the rainforests of Central and South America.

Last year Time magazine named researcher Mark Plotkin an
environmental "Hero for the Planet." Plotkin has spent nearly 20 years
in
the rain forests of Central and South America, and is working to save
not
only the forests, but also the tribes who live there. He’s just
finished a
new book entitled "Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature’s Healing
Secrets." In it he argues that many ancient tribes of the forests
understand
plants better than botanists. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester
Graham recently talked with Plotkin and asked about his work:

Related Links

Chocolate Crisis

For years, environmentalists have searched for an issue that wouldmotivate all levels of society into protection of the rainforest. AsGreat Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston has discovered,a sweet solution might be just around the corner.