It was a once in a lifetime chance for the young woman to make her point. As she walked to the podium, Elizabeth Wathuti, Kenya’s rising environmentalist, could see President Joe Biden in the audience. It really was she says, her moment to impress on global leaders who should atone for sins against a heating planet.
At last November’s UN climate change conference (Cop26) in Glasgow Wathuti’s speech enumerated the struggles low-income countries face feeding their populations due to the climate crisis. “As we sit comfortably here, more than 2 million of my fellow Kenyans are facing climate-related starvation. In this past year, both our rainy seasons have failed and scientists say that it may be another 12 months before the water returns again. Meanwhile, our rivers are running dry, our harvests are failing,” she said. “Our store houses stand empty. Our animals and people are dying.”
Her speech caught the attention of the US president. “I saw Biden’s security team trying to signal to the president that it was time to leave but he waved them off. He wanted to listen. Perhaps I had something he really needed to hear,” she says.
Since that “Glasgow moment”, Wathuti diary is packed. When the 27-year-old is not addressing an environmental forum in some corner of the world, she engaging young people in discussions on conservation, or talking to fellow activists, including Greta Thunbergand the Dalai Lama,
I finally caught up with Wathuti at a Nairobi hotel in early May. She was exhausted after a day of meetings and had not had time to eat. Meetings, she says, drain her physically and emotionally. “Even this interview will drain me,” she adds, but shrugs off the suggestion we meet a week later instead.
“You will not find me,” she says with a smile. “I will be gone for months.” She had been invited to the sustainable energy forum in Rwanda. From there she was going to Switzerland to take part in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum, sharing the platform with the US climate envoy John Kerry. Sweden, for the Stockholm +50 meeting, was her next stop; she would then move on to Germany for a climate change conference, then the UK for the Glastonbury festival. Nairobi was the best chance before “these few engagements”.
In Nairobi, the environmental studies graduate had been moderating a seminar on tracking the money donated to Africa for climate financing. “How do local communities know how to access such funds? What should they do with the money? It is one thing to ask rich nations for funds and another to account for what’s received. We need a mechanism to track such funds and the impact of the money on local communities,” she says. “Some communities never get to know when such cash has been remitted to developing countries. We have poor mechanisms to hold those in authority accountable.”
Wathuti began her activism while at elementary school on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Her home was not far from that of the late Wangari Maathai. Wathuti grew up admiring the Nobel laureate’s work through her Green Belt Movement. “My dream was to meet Wangari Maathai but I never did. She passed on when I was in school. I wanted to understand where she drew her strength and determination to fight for the environment. I read her book, Unbowed, seven times the moment I realised I would never meet her. The book was speaking to me,” she says.
Maathai inspired Wathuti who began planting trees around her neighbourhood and at the local school. She says she was oblivious to how big the climate crisis was, or that her saplings might not survive. Her village in once-fertile central Kenya was getting drier and there was less food. Granaries, formerly common features in courtyards, were no more.
“My grandmother had no gadgets to measure the weather, but the rain would come on time. She could predict how much her harvest would be. Today, she predicts and the rains fail, followed by prolonged droughts. I remember playing inside the granary full of a maize harvest but such structures have been torn down. There is not enough to eat and store,” she says.
In 2016, Wathuti became the fourth recipient of the Wangari Maathai scholarship award and founded the Green Generation Initiative to focus on the ecological crisis in her community. The group has morphed into mentoring climate-conscious children, establishing food trees in schools, and carrying out environmental education.She is head of campaigns at the Wangari Maathai Foundation, and a “mirror image of my mother”, according to Maathai’s daughter, Wanjira, who chairs the foundation’s board.
Wathuti rejects criticism that her work and that of other young activists is unlikely to make a dent in the rigid global bureaucracy. Borrowing the words of Maathai, she says she will be like the hummingbird that extinguished a forest fire with little drops of water while bigger animals, such as elephants, which could carry much more water in their trunks, just watched.
“Policymakers are more than hummingbirds. The forest is on fire and they have bigger trunks,” she says. “Mere pledges and empty promises won’t do.”
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