In the 1970s, rural women across Kenya kept telling Wangari Maathai the same complaint: the streams were drying up, firewood was getting harder to find, and the soil kept washing away. She was a scientist by training, one of the first women in East Africa to earn a doctorate, and she decided the answer was almost embarrassingly simple — plant trees.
She started the Green Belt Movement in 1977, paying women small amounts to grow tree seedlings and plant them across deforested land. What began as an environmental fix quickly became something larger: women who had never controlled any income of their own were suddenly organizing, earning, and gaining a voice in decisions about their land.
The government of the time saw the movement as a political threat. Maathai was arrested multiple times, beaten during one protest against government land grabs, and publicly mocked by officials. She kept planting anyway, insisting that protecting a country's environment and holding its government accountable were the same fight.
By the time she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, the movement she'd started with a handful of seedlings had planted over fifty million trees across Kenya.