Radical Utu. Besi Brillian Muhonja

       2

       Replenishing the Earth

       Maathai’s Holistic Environmentalism

      This chapter focuses on Wangari Maathai’s critical thoughts and philosophies on the subject of environmental conservation, articulated in Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World (2010) and The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2003) as well as her lectures, speeches, articles, interviews, and activist exercises. I abstract from these a conceptualization of holistic environmentalism that offers a path to sustainable environmental (re)production, protection, and justice, which serves as a path to other forms of social justice. Maathai’s critical ideas analyzed in the four sections of this chapter exemplify her trademark holistic environmentalism that is rooted in radical utu. The first and second sections systemize what she considered the necessary jumping-off point for any efforts at environmental defense work: an understanding of and appreciation for the state of the environment. As she reasoned, “The immediate response to the crisis is the rainfall has not come. ‘The rains did not come.’ But very few of us ask, ‘Why didn’t the rains come?’ That’s the challenge. We need to ask ourselves, and that’s why we’re being challenged to think holistically” (Maathai 2005b). Maathai suggested that the practice of holistic environmentalism requires approaches based on a comprehensive understanding of specific environments, and this demands a shift in outlooks and approaches in the study of ecologies. In the first section, I cover the lenses and perspectives she proposed for reading environments and the entities and interactions within those environments. These perspectives would be incomplete without historicizing localized states of environments, as I demonstrate in the second section, using Maathai’s analysis of Kenya’s environmental history.

      Proficiency and familiarity with the state of the environment informs the development of critical approaches for investigating environmental issues and environmentalism as well as appropriate and effective models for practical conservationism. In sections three and four, I present the processes that follow the acquisition of the insights identified above—that is, the definition of environmentalist knowledge construction and activist models. The principles articulated in Maathai’s work and delineated in these sections endorse the designing of approaches for environmentalism, which serve both the physical world and the human beings residing in it. Apposite and well-directed conservationism, for Maathai, was difficult to achieve without clear foundational values and ideals. The frameworks that emerge from this examination of her work and words center the ideal that environmental management exists in synergetic relationships with other processes and realities, including peace, security, health, capacity building, and poverty reduction. It is through this filter that she conceptualized conservation, environmental justice, and ecological security not only as bound to but also as a route to ensuring other types of security, including food, human, and national.

      Translation of these ideas and ideals into active radical environmentalism is made possible by the processes and frameworks described. Maathai named environmental protection and replenishing as political acts, conceptualizing the act of planting trees as a symbol of defiance (Maathai 2006). Teasing out this idea, I complete the chapter by focalizing applications of Maathai’s critical thoughts and values toward activating what I call utu-driven eco-revolutions.

      Utu and Cognizing Environments

      Desmond Tutu deciphers, “Africa is the birthplace of ubuntu, the ancient spirituality of humanity, oneness with our creator, the other, and nature. Together with humanity’s team, I dream of a new world and a new humanity—a humanity that expresses ubuntu. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—I am because we are. We are all one” (2012). Per this definition, the human condition and the condition of being human are intimately connected to humans’ relationship with their environment. Maathai’s holistic environmentalism is inseparable from utu. She said, “Human beings have a consciousness by which we can appreciate love, beauty, creativity, and innovation or mourn the lack thereof. To the extent that we can go beyond ourselves and ordinary biological instincts, we experience what it means to be human and therefore different from other forms of life” (Maathai 2010a, 17). Maathai offered a deeper environmental dimension to the beingness of the human, arguing, “In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves and all humankind” (17). To wit, we lose some of our humanity, with damage happening at physical, psychological, and spiritual levels when our environment is mutilated. This stresses the criticality of human beings appreciating the coadjuvant nature of their relationship with the environment so they can develop appropriate ways of interacting with that environment. Such development and awareness can only nurture and further heighten their humanness—their utu.

      Maathai defined and situated “the source,” ever present in the environment, as a place of knowledge and awareness, which should inform how human beings as individuals and collectives interact with their environments (Maathai 2010, 21–22). In this conceptualization, the association between the environment and the human is sacred and symbiotic. In Maathai’s view, “if we can’t or won’t assist in the earth’s healing process, the planet might not take care of us either” (24). In the books Replenishing the Earth, Unbowed: A Memoir (2007), and The Challenge for Africa (2009), she stressed that the relationship between humans and their environment, across cultures, has always had deeply spiritual dimensions. Thus, interfaces with nature provide symbiotic healing on two levels and connect human beings to their physical and spiritual selves, whatever they define those to be, and, as a consequence, their humanity and all humanity. According to Maathai, for environmental and human rescue to be activated, individuals must meet their responsibility to their environments for themselves, their communities, and future generations locally and globally. Maathai’s philosophy of environmentalism, therefore, is rooted in a universal utu (Maathai 2010a, 16–17), which triggers and sustains holistic thinking. Below, I outline the changes in perspectives she conceptualized to inform this way of being and knowing.

      Maathai proposed a tridimensional approach to understanding the environment, which combined application of the big-picture perspective (thinking universally) and the long-view perspective (considering the environment over time), working in tandem with a consideration for the small and the local. She rationalized the big-picture perspective’s capacity to “open up deeper inquiries as to our relationship to the planet, and force us to ask questions about our attitude toward it and activities upon it—questions that, in the rush of our day-to-day lives, where we do not see our effect on the whole, we may not be able to grasp the significance of” (Maathai 2010a, 61). Maathai was quick to elaborate that the big picture can be realized at different layers beyond the individual space and person, from one’s local space to the earth as a whole. The long view’s vertical perspective of space and horizontal perspective of time “offer only more wonder and astonishment: at the magnitude of created