Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai died on September 25 in Nairobi. In 2005, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize is the latest distinction in a 30-year career that's been defined as much by Maathai's accomplishments as the controversies she has sparked. After studying in the United States in the early 1960s, Maathai returned home to become the first East African woman to earn a Ph.D. In 1977, Maathai founded thel Green Belt Movement, , an environmental group that restored indigenous forests and assisted rural women by paying them to plant trees in their communities. It has since planted over 30 million trees in Kenya, provided work for tens of thousands of women, and been replicated in dozens of other African countries.

What made Maathai's movement remarkable, and would eventually attract the attention of the Nobel committee, was how it erased the distinctions between environmentalism, feminism, democratization, and human rights advocacy. Maathai saw a direct connection between problems such as deforestation and soil erosion and the failures of Kenya's one-party state. "I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship," she says. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, she boldly confronted the country's ruling party and its autocratic president, Daniel Arap Moi. In their most visible showdown, Maathai led a successful campaign against Moi's plan to build a 62-story party headquarters, complete with a larger-than-life statue of himself, in Nairobi's Uhuru Park. Though her objections were largely environmental - the park was one of the city's few open green spaces - it was clear that she also sought to humble a "Big Man" who was not used to being defied, especially by a woman

The government vilified Maathai as an overeducated, man-hating subversive. She received death threats, was arrested more than a dozen times, and once was beaten unconscious by police. Several of her colleagues were killed and the Green Belt Movement was nearly outlawed.

When I first started, it was really an innocent response to the needs of women in rural areas. When we started planting trees to meet their needs, there was nothing beyond that. I did not see all the issues that I have to come to deal with. For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all. For instance, I tried to understand why we didn't have clean drinking water, which I had when I was a child. The link between the rural population, the land, and natural resources is very direct. But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship."Because I was a woman, I was vulnerable. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman."