She Speaks for the Trees

SIMON RODBERG, a writer in Washington, D.C., taught elementary and secondary school English for five years.

Children are natural environmentalists. Not yet conditioned to separate themselves from the rest of creation, especially from other mobile, noisy, eating and excreting creatures, they delight in all that grows. In awesomely clumsy fashion, they care for anything that is given to them, apt to love too much rather than too little and they have an instinctual distaste for desolation.

Somewhere along the way, most of us lose this connectedness; or, as our field of action enlarges, our environmental horizons do not. We disassociate our natural affections from the natural world.

Two new picture books about Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, aim to halt that process at just the right moment of child development, when wonder and wider awareness briefly coexist. Sophisti­cated and humane, these books want to help children’s concerns go beyond the local and the fantastical to a faraway country with problems very dissimilar to our own.

Maathai’s Nobel was the first given to an environmental activist, for her work in Kenya’s Green Belt Movement. She inspired and helped organize the planting of 30 million trees in 30 African countries, and protested destructive growth in Nairobi and elsewhere. Maathai is still at it, These picture books wisely focus on her early career, which affords the clearest story line: a girl who loved trees, and mourned their loss, helped reforest her home.

“Planting the Trees of Kenya,” written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola, tells the story both in wide angle and in detail. Her stippled landscapes feature intricate views of Kenyan farmland, full of women in colorful outfits, and men, women and children bearing seedlings. Nivola explains: “They did not need schooling to plant trees. They did not have to wait for the government to help them. They could begin to change their own lives.”

Jeanette Winter’s simpler, more down-to-earth book, “Wangari’s Trees of Peace,” strikes the balance between fact and child-friendliness. With blocky illustrations and bright colors, Maathai is treated as a friendly icon. As a child Wangari harvests sweet potatoes with her mother, and after college she gets her knees dirty with first seedlings of her own; she’s a role model who makes gardening look like serious, if back-aching, fun. This is a heroine children can relate to.

She is also one whose story will bring up uncomfortable issues. Men laugh at the women planting trees: “ ‘Women can’t do this,’ they say. ‘It takes trained foresters to plant trees.’ ” Later, a policeman beats Maathai with a billy club at a demonstration against tree-cutting, with bloody results. These episodes suggest that activism, like planting, is hard work. We see Maathai in jail: “And still she stands tall. Right is right, even if you’re alone.” She is not alone, as the sequence of planting women on the next page makes clear.

Global consciousness has to start somewhere. It is the one plant, the one girl who inspires the lifelong, worldwide change. “We are planting the seeds of hope,” Maathai tells the village women. The trick is to turn those seeds into a revitalized earth.

PLANTING THE TREES OF KENYA

The Story of Wangari Maathai

Written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola

Unpaged. Frances Foster Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.95 (Ages 5 to 8)

WANGARI’S TREES OF PEACE

A True Story From Africa

Written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter

Unpaged. Harcourt Children’s Books. $17. (Ages 3 to 7)

[The New York Times, Sep 14, ‘08]