Wangari Maathai and the Thirty Million Seeds

In 1977, Wangari Maathai knelt in the red dirt outside Nairobi, Kenya, and pressed nine seedlings into the earth. The hills around her told a grim story — stripped bare by decades of deforestation, the soil cracked and eroding, streams drying up, families hungry. Government officials dismissed her. "What can one woman with a handful of seeds possibly do?" She kept planting.…