Nobel laureate Maathai dies

Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai dies of Kenya.

NAIROBI: Kenya's Wangari Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her environmental work, has died of cancer, the campaigning movement she founded announced on Monday.

"It is with great sadness that the family of professor Wangari Maathai announces her passing away on 25th September 2011 at the Nairobi hospital after a prolonged and bravely borne struggle with cancer," the Green Belt Movement said in a statement.

Born in 1940, Maathai became a key figure in Kenya since founding the movement in 1977, staunchly campaigning for environmental conservation and good governance.

Since its founding, her organisation has planted some 40 million trees across Africa. In the 1970s, she also headed the Kenya Red Cross.


Maathai won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her environmental work and reforestation in her native Kenya.

She was the first woman in east and central Africa to earn a PhD, and also the first African woman and Kenyan to receive the Nobel Peace prize.

Outside Kenya, Maathai was involved in efforts to save central Africa's Congo basin forest, the world's second largest tropical forest.

Great friends

Great friends

“Give back the forest, take your town.” Trees are gifts of nature. Trees are our great friends, useful to us in many ways, give us food, shelter and Oxygen. They make the land fertile, save land from erosion.

We get timber from trees and used in making houses, boats, ships, furniture etc. Trees give us mango, coconut black berry and other fruits. Great friend’s tree helps to cause rain and provide shelter to birds and beasts.

The green rows of friends in the beauty forest sooth our eyes. Trees are essential to human life to environment to being polluted that prevents air-pollution everyday.

The great friend’s tree is a source of health, pleasure and sense of beauty, purity and nobleness in our minds.