Planting a Tree

Poverty is both a cause and a symptom of environmental degradation. You can’t say you’ll deal with just one. It’s a trap. When you’re in poverty, you’re trapped because the poorer you become, the more you degrade the environment, and the more you degrade the environment, the poorer you become. So it’s a matter of breaking the cycle.

We cannot solve all the problems that we face: we don’t have water, we don’t have energy, we don’t have food, we don’t have incomes, we’re not able to send our children to school. But we can do something—something that is cheap, that is within our power, our capacity, our resources. And planting a tree was the best idea I had. For me, it became a wonderful way of breaking the cycle.

--Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya