Biruté Galdikas’s fascination with primates started at age six, when she checked out her first library book: Curious George. By second grade, she had decided she would be an explorer—a passion that would inform the rest of her life. While a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA, she met Dr. Louis Leakey and told him she dreamed of studying orangutans—a daunting task given that orangutans were notoriously solitary animals who often lived in deep, hard-to-reach swamps. Studying them in the wild, she had been told, would be impossible. But Biruté, inspired by Jane’s and Dian’s work, eventually convinced Dr. Leakey to send her to Borneo to do just that. She traveled to the remote Tanjung Puting National Park in 1971. There were no telephones, no roads, no electricity, and no mail service. In the reserve, she set up “Camp Leakey,” where she studied orangutan behavior and ecology. In 1975, she wrote the cover article for National Geographic, bringing global attention to orangutans for the first time. She went on to create a safe haven for orangutans on the Borneo island park Pangkalan Bun, where she continues her research and efforts to rehabilitate orangutans and release them back into the wild.
As a little girl in Arkansas, I was captivated first by Jane and then by Dian and Biruté. Thirty years later, I still am. Now, reading the children’s books based on Jane’s life and the National Geographic articles about the Trimates with my children, I see that the lessons of their lives resonate through generations. For their courage and commitment to helping expand what we know about our world—even when it meant surrounding themselves with the unknown—their examples are ones I deeply admire.
Wangari Maathai
Chelsea
As a teenager in the 1990s, I watched in awe, from afar, as Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement planted trees in Kenya in an effort to fight environmental degradation and poverty. They planted one tree after another, eventually planting millions—all because of one young woman’s dream.
Born in Nyeri, Kenya, in 1940, Wangari Maathai knew even as a little girl that she wanted to be a scientist. Pursuing that ambition took her from rural Kenya around the world. In the early 1960s, she moved to Kansas to study biology, then to Pittsburgh for her master’s degree. Decades later, Wangari shared that while her student years were positive, even sheltered, she was deeply aware of the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States. That experience would help her understand the connection between protecting the environment and advancing civil rights in Kenya.
After Wangari earned her master’s in science from the University of Pittsburgh, she returned to Kenya to further her studies. She completed her PhD in veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi in 1971. This was a time when few women in the United States or in much of the world were studying science at a post-college level—in 1966, only about 15 percent of PhDs in biological and agricultural sciences in the U.S. were awarded to women. Wangari was the first woman in eastern and central Africa to earn a doctorate degree in any subject. If she had continued her studies in the United States, she would have been a pioneer here, too. But Wangari always knew she wanted to go home, to teach and to serve.
Later, as a professor and then a department chair at the University of Nairobi—the first woman to hold both positions—Wangari grew increasingly concerned about the deforestation of Kenya. Ninety percent of Kenya’s forests had been cut down since 1950. Wangari initially recruited family and friends to help her plant trees. Then she broadened her recruitment to students, colleagues, and strangers. Her grassroots community-based tree planting efforts became the Green Belt Movement, her fight against environmental degradation and poverty through planting trees. She credited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with helping her understand the links between human rights and environmental protection, and the women she met with crystalizing her mission. “When we started the Green Belt Movement, I was partly responding to needs identified by rural women, namely lack of firewood, clean drinking water, balanced diets, shelter, and income,” she said years later. “Throughout Africa, women are the primary caretakers, holding significant responsibility for tilling the land and feeding their families. As a result, they are the first to become aware of environmental damage as resources become scarce and incapable of sustaining their families.”
Wangari’s work was not without opposition. Periodically, her efforts were met with significant, even violent resistance. In January 1992, she learned that her name was on a list of pro-democracy activists being targeted by the government for assassination. The next month, she joined mothers of political prisoners being held by Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s autocratic leader. Wangari and the others took part in a hunger strike at a local park. The police broke up the demonstration and beat Wangari so brutally that she was knocked unconscious. President Moi denounced her publicly, calling her a “madwoman” and “a threat to the order and security of the country.” Still, she refused to give up on her mission.
Over time, the Green Belt Movement grew to encompass protecting disability rights, minority rights, women’s rights, and democracy, along with an ambition to fight poverty and protect the human rights of everyone in Kenya. Yet Wangari never lost her focus on planting trees. In 2004, Wangari became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; at the time, she was also an assistant minister for environment and natural resources. She moved between activism, science, teaching, running a nonprofit, and government work. She went wherever she thought she could make the maximum impact on saving Kenya’s environment and advancing the human rights of its people. She took her passion into different areas, to work with different communities, in order to make Kenya more sustainable and respectful of all people.
“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”
—WANGARI MAATHAI
When President Barack Obama nominated my mom as secretary of state in 2009, the New York Times asked experts around the world to share questions they hoped my mom would answer in her confirmation hearing. One of the experts was Wangari. Her questions covered human rights violations in Darfur, the need to protect forests in Africa—particularly in the Congo Basin—and how the United States would respond to African leaders’ growing willingness to partner with China despite that country’s disregard for human rights.
HILLARY
I had met and been impressed by Wangari, so I appreciated her questions; they broadened the scope of what issues the secretary of state should consider important for our country and the world. As I learned early on, ignoring or belittling a problem doesn’t cause it to disappear.
I sat behind my mom during the hearing, so proud of her, and also determined to look calm throughout, in part because I knew my grandmother would be watching at home. (When my mom was a senator, my grandmother would keep C-SPAN on in the background while she was exercising, knitting, eating, even reading, because she never wanted to miss a moment of my mom speaking on the Senate floor, or even, I think, walking by.)
“My mother’s legacy is multifaceted, but the one thing that unites the various elements and life and work is the power of one person to be such a potent agent of change. It doesn’t take a lot of people for real change to happen. At a time when so much seems to be going wrong, it is very easy to get overwhelmed. You don’t need an ‘army’ of people. Each of us can be agents of change.”
—WANJIRA MATHAI, WANGARI MAATHAI’S DAUGHTER
During the hearing, my mom mentioned the importance of trying to stop what she called the human devastation in Darfur, and clearly called out climate change as a security threat. When she visited Kenya later in 2009, during her first year as secretary of state, she met with Wangari and then praised her at a forum at the University of Nairobi. At our family Thanksgiving dinner that year, I remember my mom reflecting that a favorite moment of her trip to Africa was meeting with Wangari.
HILLARY
Wangari was a p
ioneer and a true visionary. She knew better than anyone that women hold the key to the future. The Green Belt Movement was led by women, first in Africa, then around the world. And, even after she had been persecuted and threatened by leaders in her country, she continued to see government as a tool for positive change. She served in a successor government to the one that had overseen attacks on her life. She was a truly incredible person, and I was honored to call her a friend.
I was always struck by Wangari’s recognition of herself as a role model. She once said in an interview, shortly after she won the Nobel Prize, that young women would come up to her with tears in their eyes to congratulate her, and that she “knew that what they were really saying was, ‘if you can do it, then maybe I too can do it.’ ” At the time of her death in 2011, the Green Belt Movement had planted more than fifty million trees. Today it has planted more than fifty-three million trees across critical watersheds in Kenya, and the total only grows. Her daughter, Wanjira Mathai, continues her work.
Wangari wasn’t afraid to be the first person to take up a worthwhile cause, or the loudest voice advocating for what she believed. But she knew that, as with the forests she planted, the greatest impact she could have would come from being one of many. That’s why I think of Wangari when I learn about her kindred spirits, like G. Devaki Amma in India. Nearly four decades ago, inspired by a love of farming, she planted a single sapling in her backyard—then another, then another. Today she has cultivated her own forest, spread over four and a half acres in Kerala. She is passionate about helping her family and others neutralize their carbon footprint. At eighty-five years old she still walks the land every morning. By planting trees, she and others are making clear that forest health is integral to our health and to women’s rights and human rights.
Alice Min Soo Chun
Hillary
Alice Min Soo Chun and her parents moved to the U.S. in 1968 when she was three years old, leaving behind poverty in South Korea and hoping for a different, brighter future in the United States. Growing up in a low-income neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, where none of the other kids looked like her, Alice focused on tuning out the bullying in order to simply survive. But she was always creative—a trait encouraged by her father, an architect; and her mother, a painter. Alice remembers helping to load a massive pile of wood onto the roof of the family car so her mother could bring it home and use it to build a fireplace mantel. “We were always doing things like that,” she said, laughing.
Her parents moved back to South Korea when Alice was a teenager, and for a while, she stayed with them. But she wanted to go to school in the United States, and that’s exactly what she did, putting herself through college at Penn State and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Balancing school and work was grueling, and she didn’t see her parents for nearly nine years. Through hard work and laser focus, she built a career for herself in New York City, eventually becoming a professor of architecture and material technology at Columbia University and at the New School’s Parsons School for Design.
When Alice’s son, Quinn, developed asthma, her life changed forever. On one of their frequent trips to the doctor, she looked up to see that the waiting room was crowded with worried mothers, looking on as their children puffed on inhalers or waited to be hooked up to a nebulizer. More than once, Alice and Quinn wound up in the emergency room. “When your child can’t breathe, and their lips are turning blue, you would do anything to help them,” Alice said. “I kept saying: Why is this happening to our kids?”
She had once heard a saying: “A worried mom does better research than the FBI.” Alice delved into books and mined reports, searching for statistics and confirming soaring childhood asthma rates due to air pollution, especially in places like New York City. The more she learned, the more outraged she became. Her concern shifted from her son, who at least had access to quality medical care, to children around the world, particularly in places where families relied on dangerous, outdated technologies like kerosene lamps and solid-fuel cookstoves. They were breathing polluted air not only outside but inside of their homes. She learned that each year nearly 3.8 million people, mainly women and children, die prematurely from illnesses related to household air pollution. While electric lights and stoves could offer a safer solution, 1.6 billion people around the globe have no access to electricity, and Alice knew the urgency of climate change would require alternative energy sources. “I wasn’t sure what to do, but I knew the risk of doing nothing was greater than the risk of being wrong,” said Alice.
At work, she turned her focus to sustainable design and began looking for ways to incorporate solar energy into everyday life. As a materials lab director at the Parsons School of Design, Alice knew the material technology trends were becoming thinner, lighter, faster, and smarter. Why not literally weave solar energy into the fabric of her work? In 2008, she started sewing flexible solar panels to fabric and thin plastics, creating a canvas that was both beautiful and useful.
Alice began developing a prototype inflatable solar light in 2008. In 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti, Alice offered a challenge to her design students: Come up with a solution for disaster relief that could be used immediately by an individual. She and some of her students built the prototype for the solar light as a detail unit for a class project.
In 2011, Alice realized she could use origami techniques to create a cube shape that filled with air on its own, eliminating the germs that came from inflating by mouth. She named it the SolarPuff. Alice started a nonprofit called Studio Unite, trying to get the SolarPuff mass-produced. She soon realized that unfortunately the charity model was not sustainable for what she was attempting to do at a much larger scale. In 2015, she established Solight Design and launched the SolarPuff via a crowdfunding campaign that raised almost half a million dollars in thirty days. Alice set aside her teaching to be a full-time social entrepreneur.
Alice couldn’t stop thinking about how to bring relief, safety, and security to disaster areas, along with hope, wonder, and awe. Her company sent SolarPuffs to volunteers who climbed Nepal’s hillsides with Sherpas, bringing light to small villages. In the central plateaus of Haiti, farmers saw the lights and started to sing and dance and cry. Children laughed with delight when they saw how the SolarPuff popped up into a cube. Around the world, where SolarPuffs are, children can see at home to study in the evenings without a fire or a kerosene lamp, and mothers can cook food more safely. In a refugee camp in Greece, a wedding was lit by SolarPuffs. At that same camp, Alice and her “light warriors” put a SolarPuff by the bedside of a teenager who had been badly burned and faced a long recovery. After Alice left, she always wondered what happened to the girl. One day her team received a photograph: It showed the SolarPuff on a dining room table in Germany, where the young woman now lived.
After Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Alice sent three thousand SolarPuffs to Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan. The mayor began handing them out everywhere she went. People on the streets started calling the SolarPuff the “cube of hope.” The next year at Christmas, disturbed to hear how many neighborhoods were still without power, Alice packed a suitcase with SolarPuffs and got on a plane. She had seen pictures of Puerto Rico and the island of Dominica showing fields of houses with the roofs ripped off from heavy winds. So she went to those places herself. She knew from her time in Haiti that children are often the most vulnerable after a disaster. She distributed hundreds of SolarPuffs at local schools for children to bring home so they could do their homework at night and light their families’ homes. “What I realized was that children are the best teachers in the world,” she said. “I would tell them: Even more powerful than the sun is the light in your mind, your imagination.”
“In order to survive a terrible situation, you have to have hope.”
—ALICE MIN SOO CHUN
“It wasn’t easy, starting a company and becoming a social entrepreneur,” Alice said. “At times, it was extremely difficul
t. There were people who told me I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t smart enough. Many times, I wanted to give up, but I didn’t, because I kept thinking about my son—the life his children and grandchildren would have in an environment where pollution is compromising their health. I just kept going, and I didn’t give up.”
At the 2019 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference in San Juan, I met Alice. She told me that the SolarPuff was available in twenty countries around the world and sold in the United States at camping stores like REI. Alice took the stage at the conference carrying her newest innovation, the QWNN solar lantern, named after her now-fourteen-year-old son. “It’s individualized infrastructure,” she said. “Every person has the power to harness energy and use it for their life, their livelihood. And together, we can bring light to the darkest corners of the world, one person at a time.” By turning her outrage on behalf of her son and children everywhere into hope for millions, that’s exactly what Alice has done.
Greta Thunberg
Hillary
In August 2018, when it came time to return to classes at her high school in Stockholm, then fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg decided to go on strike instead. Like many countries, Sweden had seen record-breaking heat that summer. The news out of the scientific community was bad, and Greta had had enough. She wrote “SKOLSTREJK FÖR KLIMATET”—“School Strike for Climate”—in black letters on a piece of wood. Then she put a few snacks in her backpack, put on her sneakers, and headed down to the Swedish national legislature, the Riksdag, to set up camp on the sidewalk out front. Her goal was to protest her government’s inaction on what she sees as the greatest threat facing her generation: climate change.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 12
