Whispers of The Hummingbird
In honor of the late Wangari Maathai’s legacy, and to celebrate her birthday, I spoke to women who embody Maathai’s ethos of perseverance, practicality and women’s empowerment in the global transition to a sustainable future.
April 1st this year marked what would have been Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmentalist Wangari Muta Maathai’s 77th birthday. The Greenbelt Movement that Maathai founded in 1977 has, to date, planted over 51 million trees in Kenya, with 4.1 million planted in 2015 alone. In February of this year, Africa-renowned architects Boogertman and Partners erected a beautiful circular facility in her honor in Nairobi, emphasising the communal nature of the path to sustainability, a theme central to Maathai’s vision when she was alive. The structure will house the new Greenbelt Movement offices, and is surrounded by dense forest on all sides, pointing to Maathai’s reforestation focus. Maathai, who was educated in the U.S., called on Americans to lead the fight against climate change, with the belief that the rest of the world would follow.
Honoring her legacy seems all the more essential at a time when environmental gains made in the U.S. are under threat, with potentially far-reaching global implications. In celebration of the late Maathai’s birthday, I spoke to women who are inspiring sustainable practices through their work, from the grassroots level to top-down regional policy decisions. Yvette Tetteh, a gardening teacher in Accra, and Dr. Musonda Mumba of the UN provide key insights into the importance of women’s leadership, joy and perseverance in continuing to foster environmental change.
There is an often repeated the notion within the environmental movement that in developing countries, and across African nations in particular, there is little sustainability effort to speak of beyond the environmental practices of indigenous peoples. Dr. Musonda Mumba, a UN expert on climate change and ecosystem-based adaptation who lives in Nairobi explained, “that view is exactly what most people have for a continent that’s not a country but a region with very diverse, incredibly different countries and ecological regions.”
“The ambition therefore would be to have a collective voice even though people reside in incredibly different locales: forests, drylands, wetlands and coastal area.”
In an interview conducted over email, Dr. Mumba described her view of sustainability work; “There are ‘clusters’ of movements in the different sub-regions of the continent. The only challenge is that they may or may not be communicating with each other.” Adding that social media provides an important tool for widespread environmental organizing efforts, Dr. Mumba, who works on climate adaptation in the mountain ecosystems of Peru, Uganda and Nepal, also sees a need for unity across multi-dimensional environmental groups. “The ambition therefore would be to have a collective voice even though people reside in incredibly different locales: forests, drylands, wetlands and coastal area,” she said, in acknowledgment of regional and local differences in language, dialect and perhaps most importantly for sustainability work, ecosystem. But it’s not just UN academics who are continuing Maathai’s vision.
Yvette Tetteh is a young woman based in Accra, Ghana, working to foster just such environmental stewardship through sustainable farming with local youth. “What continues to drive me is an elemental connection with the earth, but more broadly a sense of home, connected to feeling and energy and the environment,” she said in a recent interview. For Tetteh, the drive for widespread sustainable practices plays out on a localized, personal level every week in western Accra, at Cambridge Prep School where she has created a gardening program. Each week, with a group of 25 students between the ages of 13 and 15, Tetteh has been developing an organic garden and working toward the elimination and proper disposal of trash from the school grounds.
While her work with the students is focused on learning how to grow food sustainably and providing tangible agricultural skills, Tetteh also has a more holistic view to environmental education. Through self-reflective writing exercises and even some yoga techniques, students are learning the basics of organic gardening and the importance of the environment to human wellness.
For Tetteh, the sustenance of environmental work lies in emotional and personal connection. In our conversation, she emphasised the importance of fostering both mutual trust and self-esteem; “I’m nurturing some small whispers of environment and health, and hopefully the children’s confidence to think and act on those things, seeing themselves as agents.”
There is a folk story on personal agency that Maathai loved when she was alive and ultimately narrated in recorded form, accompanied by colourful animation, for a documentary called “Dirt!” The tale as she tells it begins with a group of animals mournfully watching as their forest home is engulfed by a wild fire around them. In the animation elephants, rabbits, guinea fowl, racoons and bears gaze fearfully upon the flames that lick the forest canopy above them. “They feel overwhelmed and powerless,” Maathai narrates, “except this little hummingbird.”
The hummingbird flies above this eclectic mix of animals, turning away from her overwhelmed forest companions to travel toward a nearby stream. Once there she takes a single drop of water in her beak and flies back to drop it on the fire. Travelling back and forth as fast as she can, the hummingbird continues to bring water drops from the stream, dropping them into the fire each time. All the while the other animals, even the much bigger ones like the elephants with big trunks that could carry far more water, look on helplessly. They tell the hummingbird she simply can’t make a difference here; “you’re too little, and your beak — so small!” In Maathai’s narration, the hummingbird turns to the animals and says proudly, “I’m doing the best I can!”
“That — to me — is what all of us should do. We should always feel like a hummingbird,” Maathai ends, tilting her chin up to the camera. “I may feel insignificant, but I certainly don’t want to be like the animals watching as the planet goes down the drain.”
For Tetteh, the question of impact is a balancing act. “A year ago I was like I want roll out a program across all secondary schools in Ghana,” she says, “and now I’m like okay start small — one single school, one group of students, okay what am I doing session four.” Ultimately, her focus is on the depth and sustainability of the program; “It’s important to me that [my students] know that I care on a personal level.”
Beyond the simple beauty of her folk tale, Maathai’s words on the hummingbird find resonance today for women working globally to create a more just and sustainable world. In the U.S., the phrase “Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a rallying cry for feminists and those working in defiance of the current administration. For Dr. Mumba, gender research informs important policy-making decisions that guide ecosystem-based efforts toward climate adaptation. In her experience from Peru to Uganda, Dr. Mumba highlights the prevalence and significance of female-led households. “The majority don’t own the land they grow their food on and as such have no or minimal decision making power,” she said, explaining that part of her work focuses on “influencing policy change that doesn’t disadvantage women in a changing climate.” Through her organization, the Network of African Women Environmentalists (NAWE), Dr. Mumba hopes to influence actionable solutions to environmental problems across the diaspora, focusing on common stories that invoke positive change that is already happening.
Focusing on the beauty of the work that they do is a sentiment running through both Dr. Mumba and Tetteh’s stories. “At the end of the day it gives me joy to garden and plant,” Yvette laughed in response to a question on what brought her to Accra’s Cambridge school, “and even when I’m really tired and stressed its energising to see the students engage in planting seeds, and tilling the soil.”
