Maathai, Wangari Filmography

• Dirt! The Movie
  2009, role: actress , character name: Nobel Laureate
• The 40th NAACP Image Awards
  2009, role: actress , character name: Herself
• Dirt! The Movie
  2009, role: actress , character name: Founder - Green Belt Movement
• The Challenge for Africa
  2009, role: actress
• Nous resterons sur Terre
  2009, role: actress , character name: Herself
• Rescuing Emmanuel
  2009, role: actress
• Weather Report
  2008, role: actress , character name: Herself - Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
• Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai
  2008, role: actress , character name: Herself
• Blue Gold: World Water Wars
  2008, role: actress , character name: Himself
• The 11th Hour
  2007, role: actress , character name: Herself - Founder, Greenbelt Movement, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
• Nobelity
  2006, role: actress

Famous quotes by Wangari Maathai:

"We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is the powerful, including governments, that are responsible."

"You must not deal only with the symptoms. You have to get to the root causes by promoting environmental rehabilitation and empowering people to do things for themselves. What is done for the people without involving them cannot be sustained."

"When you have the environment degraded, it is always so that we are going to fight over the few resources that are left."

"Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys from time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that."

"African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence."

"All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet."

"Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious."

"The privilege of a higher education, especially outside Africa, broadened my original horizon and encouraged me to focus on the environment, women and development in order to improve the quality of life of people in my country in particular and in the African region in general."

"It is important to nurture any new ideas and initiatives which can make a difference for Africa."

"We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind."

"We need to promote development that does not destroy our environment."

"I am working to make sure we don't only protect the environment, we also improve governance."

"You can educate people on how to preempt their own conflict."

"I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me."

"And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now."

"You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth."

"It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men."

"That's the way I do things when I want to celebrate, I always plant a tree. And so I got an indigenous tree, called Nandi flame, it has this beautiful red flowers. When it is in flower it is like it is in flame."

"Women are responsible for their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve."

"It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem."