Environmentalist Accepts Award ; Nobel Peace Prize Goes to African Activist, 64
Posted on: Sunday, 12 December 2004, 18:00 CST
OSLO, Norway - To the beat of African drums, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai received her Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, telling the audience of royals, celebrities and diplomats that protecting the world's resources is linked to halting violence.
"Today, we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system," said the first African woman and first environmental activist to win the peace prize.
Maathai, 64, warned that the world remained under attack from disease, deforestation and war.
"We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds, and in the process heal our own, indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder," she told the crowd.
"This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process," said Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement. She receiving the traditional gold medal and diploma that accompanies the $1.5 million prize.
Before she took the stage, three African dancers and accompanying drummers pounded out a brief piece of African music that echoed off the walls of the large auditorium.
In neighboring Sweden, the other Nobel prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics were awarded.
Absent from Stockholm was the literature prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek of Austria, who cited a social phobia. She sent a prerecorded video lecture.
Presenting her award, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said the writer has "given new currency to a heretical feminine tradition and have expanded the art of literature."
Americans Richard Axel and Linda Buck won the medicine prize for their work on the sense of smell. Americans David Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the physics prize for their explanation of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus.
The chemistry prize was awarded to Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose for their work in discovering a process that lets cells destroy unwanted proteins.
Norwegian Finn Kydland and American Edward Prescott received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for shedding light on how government policies and actions affect economies worldwide.
ABOUT WANGARI MAATHAI
Born: Nyeri, Kenya, in 1940.
Education: University education in the United States, Germany and Nairobi, Kenya; Ph.D. in biological sciences in 1971; associate professor in 1977.
POLITICAL Career: Elected to Kenyan parliament in 2002; named assistant minister for environment in 2003.
Activism: Established Green Belt Movement in 1977; it has helped women plant about 30 million trees across Africa to combat deforestation that often deepens poverty.
Member of the U.N. Environment Program's Global 500 Hall of Fame
Serves on boards of several international organizations.
Source: Green Belt Movement
Source: Columbian
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