This is the information photo of Wangari Maathai, Deputy Minister of Environment and Natural Resources of Kenya, taken on January 6, 2003.

Winning the Nobel Prize is a lofty and hard to reach life goal for a person. Who can believe that someone has won the Nobel Peace Prize because he planted nine trees in his backyard.

Matai, a Kenyan woman born in poverty. Neither her ordinary parents nor she herself thought of it, because she planted nine trees in her backyard in 1977, and then founded the green environmental protection organization "Green Belt Movement", which launched a wide tree planting movement throughout Africa, so that she walked on the Nobel Prize awarding platform in 2004 and won the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Since the establishment of the Nobel Prize in 1901, The first African woman to win this honor is also the seventh African to win this honor after Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa, and Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations.

In 1940, Matai was born in a small village in Kenya. When she was young, there were green mountains and plantations around her hometown. At that time, she was an ordinary girl. Because of her hard work, she has always had excellent results. In 1960, she was sent by the Kenyan government to study in the United States. After returning home from studying abroad, Maathai was filled with pain when he witnessed the gradual loss of his green home due to uncontrolled logging. The forest coverage rate in Kenya is less than 2%, and the increasing scarcity of forest resources is leading to drought and poverty for countless families. In Kenya, women's job is to collect firewood. In the morning, they go out with a small axe. When they have enough firewood, they go home to cook. Therefore, Kenyan women are called "tree fellers".

She was deeply worried that the deterioration of the ecological environment was having a disastrous impact on Kenya and the whole of Africa, so she wrote articles in the media calling on women to change from "tree fellers" to "tree planters".

The first thing she did was to plant 9 trees in her backyard with her family. Then, she announced the establishment of the environmental protection organization "Green Belt Movement", and invited women nearby to participate. She hoped that every woman would become a member of the organization and fight with her against the increasingly rampant deforestation in the African continent.

"Is it difficult to plant a tree?" She asked her female compatriots at the beginning of every speech, "This is just a simple task, why don't we?" Since 1977, for more than 30 years, Maathai has unremittingly mobilized poor African women to plant more than 30 million trees in Kenya and other parts of Africa. More and more women and students have joined them. Green has spread from Matai's home to the whole village, to a county or province, to Kenya, and then to Africa. The "Green Belt Movement" has created the most important and effective afforestation project in Africa.

Planting a tree is a simple task that any of us can do. African black woman Maathai has presented her own magnificent picture of life. 【 Climate Change Channel 】

Related news in 2004

Xinhua, Stockholm, October 8 Oslo news: The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on the 8th that it would award the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize to Wangari Maathai, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of Kenya. This woman who launched the African tree planting campaign is the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its statement that the award of this year's Peace Prize to Maathai was to reward her "contributions to sustainable development, democracy and peace".

Matai, 64, has a doctorate. In 1977, she founded the "Green Belt Movement" in Kenya, which has planted at least 10 million trees so far, providing employment opportunities for tens of thousands of people while protecting the ecological environment.