“Innovation is the exit strategy for aid.”
Dr. Abdallah Daar during his conversation with Krista Tippett at the Chautauqua Institution to kick off a week-long series of interviews based on the theme of “Inspire. Commit. Act.”
Q:Could you identify the beautiful chorale music that accompanied the Maathai program?
Anonymous
Oh, you’ve asked a question that warms my heart!
The choral music comes from an album titled Missa Luba, performed by the Muungano National Choir of Kenya. We played two tracks in our show with Wangari Maathai from that recording: the first song is the fourth section an African Mass — sung in Latin — titled “Sanctus” and the second, the African folk song “Kaunga Yachee.” (Did you know that you can listen to a streaming version of all tracks from our show’s playlist?)
The original version by Guido Haazen, a Belgian Franciscan priest, was composed for a Congolese boys choir. The liner notes of the Muungano choir’s album provide this helpful description:
“Missa Luba was written before the Second Vatican Council when Latin was still the official language of the Roman Rite in Africa. This setting combines the ancient Latin text with modified African rhythms and polyphony in a manner that seems to bring out the best in both.
The rhythms and polyphony of the African settings are directly accessible to all ages. Students can see how Latin was used in this adaptation of a musical form from Africa. The tempo has been reduced so that the typical African sounds become more like that of Roman chant. The examples of African music which follow can be used to compare and contrast with those of Missa Luba. One can note the difference in using indigenous languages when it comes to indigenous music.
Sadly, earlier this summer, Boniface Mghanga, the founder and leader of the Kenyan choir, died in a car accident at the age of 56.
~answered by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Wangari Maathai: A Remarkable Woman for All People and Places
by Krista Tippett, host
Per Ludrig Magnus, the Norwegian Ambassador to Kenya, signs a condolence book for Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai in Nairobi. (photo: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images)
I am so glad I experienced Wangari Maathai in person, in her time on this Earth. She had a wonderful voice and an infectious whole-body laugh. You will even hear her sing if you listen to the end of this hour of “Planting the Future.” I experienced her as immensely gracious but rather subdued until she started speaking about her work. Then, sitting across from her, it was not hard to imagine that this woman had stood up to a dictator and won, and that she had fought off encroaching desert by leading thousands of people to plant tens of millions of trees.
Wangari Maathai was born in colonial Africa in 1940. She excelled in science and trained as a biologist. She became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a Ph.D. and the first woman to chair a department at the University of Nairobi. In the mid-1970s, she started planting trees with rural Kenyan women who were feeling the consequences of soil erosion and deforestation in their daily lives. They walked far distances for water, had too little firewood and fodder for animals, and lacked nutritious food and sources of income.
Planting trees was both a simple response to their crisis and a dramatically effective one. It restored a simple link that had been broken between human beings and the land on which they live — the kind of link that we often take for granted until, as Maathai said, we move away from the world we know — spatially, economically, or spiritually. For several years before her environmental work began, Wangari Maathai had been away from Kenya. When she returned, she saw with fresh eyes that “the earth was naked,” and continued, “For me, the mission was to try to cover it with green.”
For a quarter century, Wangari Maathai and the women of her Green Belt Movement faced off against powerful economic forces and Kenya’s tyrannical ruler, Daniel arap Moi. She was beaten and imprisoned. Nevertheless, the movement spread to more than 600 communities across Kenya and into over 30 countries. After Moi’s fall from power in 2002, Wangari Maathai was elected to her country’s parliament with 98 percent of the vote.
My curiosity, of course, always drives towards the spiritual and ethical questions and convictions that drive human action. And though I could find few interviewers who had asked Wangari Maathai about this, she was happy to talk about the faith behind her ecological passion — a lively fusion of Christianity, real world encounters with good and evil, and the ancestral Kikuyu traditions of Kenya’s central highlands. She grew up there, schooled by Catholic missionaries, and she remained a practicing Catholic. But life taught her to value anew the Kikuyu culture of her family’s ancestry.
The Kikuyu traditionally worshipped under trees and honored Mount Kenya — Africa’s second highest mountain — as the place where God resides. That mountain, as Wangari Maathai only later understood scientifically, is the source of most of Kenya’s rivers. And the fig trees considered most sacred by the Kikuyu — those it was impermissible to cut down — had the deepest roots, bringing water from deep below the earth to the surface. The volatility of the environment across the Horn of Africa now is compounded by the fact that those trees have been cut away systematically for decades, along with millions of others, by colonial Christians as well as African industrialists.
We in the West are in the process of relearning something that Wangari Maathai, from the vantage point of Africa, realized long ago: ecology is a matter of life and death, peace and war. In awarding her the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel committee noted that “when we analyze local conflicts, we tend to focus on their ethnic and religious aspects. But it is often the underlying ecological circumstances that bring the more readily visible factors to the flashpoint.” In places as far flung as the Sudan, the Philippines, Mexico, Haiti and the Himalayas, deforestation, encroaching desert, and soil erosion are among the present root causes of civil unrest and war. Wangari Maathai cited a history of inequitable distribution of natural resources, especially land, as a key trigger in the Kenyan post-election violence in 2008.
As our conversation drew to a close, I asked Wangari Maathai a religious question I rarely pose directly, because it is so intimate and so difficult to answer directly. I asked her, rather baldly, to tell me about her image of God. She told me that she had often revisited two concepts of God that stood in some tension, side by side, in her upbringing — the Christian God who was painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and the God of Kikuyu culture who lived on Mount Kenya. “Now where is God?,” Wangari Maathai asked me in response. Here’s how she answered her own question:
“I tell myself that of course now we’re in a completely new era when we are learning to find God not in a place, but rather in ourselves, in each other, in nature. In many ways it’s a contradiction, because the Church teaches you that God is omnipresent. Now if He is omnipresent, He’s in Rome, but He could also be in Kenya. His shape, His size, His color … I have no idea. You are influenced by what you hear, what you see. But when I look at Mount Kenya — it is so magnificent, it is so overpowering, it is so important in sustaining life in my area — that sometimes I say yes, God is on this mountain.”
Tuesday Evening Melody: “Hallo” by DRC Music
by Chris Heagle, technical director
Cool new music and a good cause. Hard to argue with that.
This weeks’ track comes from a new project put together by Damon Albarn of Gorillaz fame. In July, he traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with a group of 11 producers to record an album in 5 days… and film the whole process. The result is a remarkable collaboration across cultures called Kinshasa One Two. This song “Hallo” appears to be the early hit from the album. All proceeds from the record will go to Oxfam, which is providing aid to those affected by the deepening humanitarian crisis in the DRC.
Muddy Depictions Create New Ways of Seeing
by Krista Tippett, host
Katy Payne is the kind of person I love to interview. For starters, she is warm and delightful, wise and instructive, about things I had never pondered before. And though eminent in her field of “acoustic biology,” she is not a famous name.
She is a practicing Quaker and a student of the spiritual philosophy of the 20th-century, Greek-Armenian philosopher Gurdjieff, who taught self-awareness and openness to reality. The spirituality she reveals during our conversation derives its passion directly from life — and from her rare, intimate experience of usually hidden slices of the natural world.
Katy Payne is a beautiful example of a line that I love from the writer Annie Dillard — words that I take as a definition of vocation: “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your astonishment.”
Payne has spent a life following her astonishment at the lives and language of whales and elephants. Along the way, her reverent attention has led to a few breakthrough scientific discoveries.
Katy Payne was a listener long before she became a self-trained acoustic biologist. She loved music before she loved biology, and as an undergraduate at Cornell she studied both. From there, in the 1960s, she became part of the first team of scientists to understand that humpback whales communicate by song. She later discovered that their songs are not inborn and fixed, but constantly evolving. Whales, like people, she says, are composers.
That is just one of the things I know about the planet I inhabit, from this conversation with Katy Payne, that I might not have learned otherwise. She also teaches me that elephants are emotional, passionate, intensely social creatures. And people who live close to them have always expressed both fear and fascination at their evident intelligence and memory and a mysterious ability to coordinate family movements across long distances.
Somewhat by chance, in the wake of her discoveries about whales, Katy Payne had an opportunity to observe elephants in a zoo in Portland, Oregon — and there she “felt” sounds that she was later able to identify as infrasonic. She later spent 15 years monitoring and decoding the basic vocabulary of elephants, and, in 1999, she founded the Elephant Listening Project in the equatorial rainforests of central Africa. This project has become a resource for thinking deeply and creatively about protecting these large and exotic creatures who increasingly compete with human beings for land and food as their habitats shrink.
I like people who muddy depictions of good and bad, right and wrong. That pit people and causes irrevocably against one another. Such voices do not simplify; they often make an “issue” feel even more complicated than before. And yet they also open our eyes to new ways of seeing, and new possibilities forward. Katy Payne offers unusual insight into the moral irony even of the noblest conservation efforts.
Over the years she has bitterly grieved the death of elephants she has studied — killed either by poachers or by culling, an official practice in some African countries of selective reduction of elephant populations that encroach on human land and livelihood. She knows that poaching is often a corollary of poverty, political instability, and hunger. She suggests that the best we can do to preserve some forms of wildlife is to support the health and vitality of the human populations with whom they coexist.
Katy Payne also experiences irony in the “No Trespassing” sign she posts on her 14 acres in upstate New York, after her years in the wildness and unbounded geography of Africa. And yet, in conversation, she makes that far-away wildness real in a way that facts and news reports and policy debates never can.
I know something about forest elephants now that makes me feel invested in their fate, as well as that of the people with whom they more closely share life. I feel myself blessed very directly by the songs of the humpback whales as Katy Payne describes the largest lessons they leave with her:
“The ocean is really huge. When you get out on a little boat, you know it. You’re clinging to a cork … And out there, rolling around and swimming through and perfectly at home in the waves are these enormous animals. And by golly, they’re singing … And so what that has done for me is to make me feel that what lies ahead is absolutely limitless. We are not at the pinnacle of human knowledge. We are just beginning.”
Creating this show is a gift. I hope you experience it that way too.
About the images above: Photo of Humpback whale in Hervey Bay, Australia by Michael Dawes. Photo of forest elephants in Dzanga-Sangha National Park, Central African Republic by Nicholas Rost.
Relearning What Our Elders Had Once Taught Us
by Krista Tippett, host
Many of my interviews are conducted over long distances, by way of a clear channel communications miracle called an ISDN line. People are often surprised to hear this because these weekly conversations about “meaning, religion, ethics, and ideas” are singularly intimate. But I have come to enjoy the discipline of a long-distance circuit. I can close my eyes and listen deeply. I encounter my guests — as my listeners do — solely by way of the human voice.
Wangari Maathai has a wonderful voice and an infectious whole-body laugh. You will even hear her sing if you listen to the end of our show “Planting the Future.” But I am glad I met her in person, because her physical presence is remarkable. She is a force of nature, with a beautiful face and flashing black eyes. She is palpably gracious but rather subdued until she starts speaking about her work. Then, sitting across from her, it is not hard to imagine that this woman has stood up to a dictator and won, and that she has fought off encroaching desert by leading thousands of people to plant 45 million trees.
Wangari Maathai was born in colonial Africa in 1940. She excelled in science and trained as a biologist. She became the first woman in Central Africa to earn a Ph.D. and the first woman to chair a department at the University of Nairobi. In the mid-1970s, she started planting trees with rural Kenyan women who were feeling the consequences of soil erosion and deforestation in their daily lives. They walked far distances for water, had too little firewood and fodder for animals, and lacked nutritious food and sources of income.
Planting trees was both a simple response to their crisis and a dramatically effective one. It restored a simple link that had been broken between human beings and the land on which they live — the kind of link that we often take for granted until, as Maathai says, we move away from the world we know — spatially, economically, or spiritually. For several years before her environmental work began, Wangari Maathai had been away from Kenya. When she returned, she saw with fresh eyes that “the earth was naked. For me, the mission was to try to cover it with green.”
For a quarter century, Wangari Maathai and the women of her Green Belt Movement improbably faced off powerful economic forces and Kenya’s tyrannical ruler, Daniel arap Moi. She was beaten and imprisoned. Nevertheless, the movement spread to 600 communities across Kenya and into 30 countries. After Moi’s fall from power in 2002, Wangari Maathai was elected to her country’s parliament with 98 percent of the vote.
My curiosity, of course, always drives towards the spiritual and ethical questions and convictions that drive human action. In the course of this conversation, Wangari Maathai describes the faith behind her ecological passion — a lively fusion of Christianity, real world encounters with good and evil, and the ancestral Kikuyu traditions of Kenya’s central highlands. She grew up there, schooled by Catholic missionaries, and she remains a practicing Catholic to this day. But life has taught her to value anew the Kikuyu culture of her family’s ancestry.
The Kikuyu traditionally worshipped under trees and honored Mount Kenya — Africa’s second highest mountain — as the place where God resides. That mountain, as Wangari Maathai only later understood scientifically, is the source of most of Kenya’s rivers. And the fig trees considered most sacred by the Kikuyu — those it was impermissible to cut down — had the deepest roots, bringing water from deep below the earth to the surface. Climate change has created a volatile ecology across the Horn of Africa, and this is compounded by the fact that those trees have been cut away systematically for decades, along with millions of others, by colonial Christians as well as African industrialists.
We in the West are in the process of relearning something that Wangari Maathai, from the vantage point of Africa, has known all along: ecology is a matter of life and death, peace and war. In awarding her the Nobel Peace prize, the Norwegian Nobel committee noted that “when we analyze local conflicts, we tend to focus on their ethnic and religious aspects. But it is often the underlying ecological circumstances that bring the more readily visible factors to the flashpoint.” In places as far flung as the Sudan, the Philippines, Mexico, Haiti and the Himalayas, deforestation, encroaching desert, and soil erosion are among the present root causes of civil unrest and war. Wangari Maathai has cited a history of inequitable distribution of natural resources, especially land, as a key trigger in the Kenyan post-election violence in 2008.
As our conversation drew to a close, I asked Wangari Maathai a religious question I rarely pose directly, because it is so intimate and so difficult to answer directly. I asked her, rather baldly, to tell me about her image of God. Wangari Maathai did not flinch. She has fielded many hard questions and situations in the course of her life, but I suspect that she has rarely flinched. She told me that she has often revisited two concepts of God that stood in some tension, side by side, in her upbringing — the Christian God who was painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and the God of Kikuyu culture who lived on Mount Kenya. “Now where is God?,” Wangari Maathai asked me in response. She continued:
“I tell myself that of course now we’re in a completely new era when we are learning to find God not in a place, but rather in ourselves, in each other, in nature. In many ways it’s a contradiction, because the Church teaches you that God is omnipresent. Now if He is omnipresent, He’s in Rome, but He could also be in Kenya. His shape, His size, His color … I have no idea. You are influenced by what you hear, what you see. But when I look at Mount Kenya — it is so magnificent, it is so overpowering, it is so important in sustaining life in my area — that sometimes I say yes, God is on this mountain.”
And, last month Wangari Maathai answered some of our executive producer’s questions about her latest book, Replenishing the Earth. Maathai discusses the necessity of science and religion in discovering deeper truths, how our “inner ecology” is “spiritually diminished” when the environment is impoverished, and how trees give meaning to mystery and life.
Angélique Kidjo’s Songs that Inspire the Struggle
by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer
“The songs tried to encourage us not simply to to be reactors, but to indicate our own initiative and our own power.”
In our interview yesterday morning, Vincent Harding spoke about the galvanizing power of song during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. He also lamented that today’s “hip-hop young people” have not produced a soundtrack for their generation that can express the “great need and desire for a better world.”
But, for many African youth, 
Angélique Kidjo is helping create this soundtrack. The 50-year-old, Grammy winner is inspiring this rising generation by revisiting music that emerged from the American civil rights movement, namely that of Curtis Mayfield, whose music shaped and was shaped by the struggles of this time.
On her most recent album, Kidjo re-crafted his 1970 hit “Move on Up.” As Kidjo told the New York Amsterdam News in 2010:
“When I first heard this song when I was a child, I couldn’t believe those issues existed in America. When I moved to America, I not only realized he was telling the truth, but that those issues are still relevant. In fact not just America, but the world. When you take a look at the children of Africa, they stopped believing in what their futures could be. None of the leaders of Africa are thinking of creating jobs or creating a place where they can feel safe, confident, proud and dignified to live in, so I wanted to dedicate that song to kids and let them know it was O.K. to dream big.”
Kidjo performed her rendition of this Mayfield classic in South Africa at the 2010 FIFA World Cup. As she told the Sowetan in June 2010: “I wanted to do and dedicate this song to the youth of Africa to show that it is possible for us to overcome the challenges. Enough of thinking that what comes from outside is better than what is from here. … Africa is not about misery and poverty, there is joy.”
(photo: Michelly Rall/Getty Images for Live Earth Events)
Africa Looks Positive, Sweden Not So Much
by Shubha Bala, associate producer
Nicholas Kristof said during his interview with Krista that he worries about constantly painting Africa in a negative light and recognizes there is a lot of good work taking place too. In this video from the TEDxChange conference, Hans Rosling, professor and co-founder of GapMinder, presented numbers in a new way to demonstrate the great progress being made in Africa towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). In fact, his breakdown of child mortality (minute 11:00) shows that if the MDG expectations were applied to Sweden from the 1800s, Sweden would have been considered a failure.
And another little gem: I found the humorous speech by the founder of the Population and Community Development Association (minute 46:00) to be a fascinating overview of Thailand’s progress. He describes how inclusive methods led to a decrease in the average family size from 7 children to 1.5 in under three decades, and more recently, a reduction in HIV cases by 90 percent.
In the screen shot (right), Mechai Viravaidya at the TEDxChange holding up his future Olympic logo idea promoting condoms.
Hummingbirds and Outrage Fatigue
by Anne Breckbill, associate web developer
“I think there is such a thing as outrage fatigue. … Because statistics like that and numbers like that, scenarios like that, are as prone to make people throw up their hands and say, well, then, you know, I can’t do anything anyway.”
During her interview with Bill McKibben, Krista suggests that all the bad environmental news and surplus of data can be overwhelming. What a common human response to a challenge that seems insurmountable! Because we cannot do something big, we are tempted to not even take the small, manageable actions that are well within our power. We feel inconsequential, completely forgetting about the cumulative impact of each person who cares for the Earth. This headline from The Onion captures the poignancy of this sentiment: “‘How Bad for the Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?’ 30 Million People Wonder.”
Listening to “The Moral Math of Climate Change” also brought to mind the 2009 Sundance Award-winning film Dirt! and the optimistic parable of the hummingbird as told by Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. Here’s hoping that the 30 million of us who wonder about the impact of one plastic bottle can adopt the tenacity and courage to be hummingbirds.
The silence of the Vatican is contempt. Its failure to fully examine its central place in Rwandan genocide can only mean that it is fully aware that it will not be threatened if it buries its head in the sand. While it knows if it ignores the sexual abuse of European parishioners it will not survive the next few years, it can let those African bodies remain buried, dehumanised and unexamined.
—Martin Kimani, from his scathing critique of the Catholic Church in today’s Cif section of The Guardian titled “For Rwandans, the Pope’s Apology Must Be Unbearable.”
Trent Gilliss, online editor
