Jeanette Winter, author-illustrator,
Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa
Harcourt Books, 2008.

Ages 7-10

Wangari Maathia, a Kenyan woman whose Green Belt Movement reforested Kenya, revitalized the lives of Kenyans in the process, and earned her the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, is the subject of this, author-illustrator Jeannette Winter’s latest picture book biography. Wangari’s Trees of Peace follows acclaimed previous books, which celebrate the lives of Georgia O’Keefe (My Name is Georgia), Mexican folk artist Josefina Aguilar (Josefina), and Alia Muhammed Baker, an Iraqi librarian who in 2001 kept 30,000 books from being destroyed in U.S. military attacks (The Librarian of Basra), among others.

Winter illustrates her spare text with folk-art-style multimedia art framed in colored borders. She begins by depicting the idyllic agrarian society, an “umbrella of green trees in the shadow of Mount Kenya,” where Wangari grew up. After winning a scholarship and studying in the United States for six years, Wangari returned in the late 1970’s to see “women bent from hauling firewood miles and miles from home. She sees barren land where no crops grow. And where are the birds?” The trees had been cut, she learns, to make room for buildings.

So Wangari began planting seedlings herself, then started a tree nursery, then began teaching village women to plant seedling trees, although “The government men laugh. ‘Women can’t do this,’ they say. ‘It takes trained foresters to plant trees.’” For each seedling that survived for three months, Wangari paid the woman a small sum, “their first earnings ever.” The tree planting movement spread, and Wangari protected the remaining old trees with her body. She spent time in prison for her activism, but the movement continued and Wangari’s trees and the women who planted them became known world-wide.

An author’s note at the back of the book fills in Wangari’s biography, telling us that her U.S. degrees were in the biological sciences, that she later became the first woman in east Kenya to earn a PhD, and that she was elected to the Kenyan Parliament.

Winter’s simple text and colorful illustrations transmit to young readers some fundamental principles of environmental conservation through an inspiring story of how one person doing one simple thing can make a huge difference in the world.

Charlotte Richardson
February 2009