A Climactic Dinner by Jake

A Climactic Dinner by Jake - February 2016 Scholarship Essay

One area that particularly ignites my desire to learn is the global environment and sustainability, an interdisciplinary field that draws insight from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. As such, I would choose to have dinner with Wangari Maathai so we could discuss and debate worldwide environmental challenges. Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan environmentalist, social activist, and political figure during the latter decades of the twentieth century. Faced with governmental corruption, jail time, and threats of assassination, Maathai was able to spearhead the Green Belt Movement, a movement that offered stipends to rural women who planted trees in their villages. While the planting of trees would alleviate the desertification, deforestation, water crises and rural hunger present in Kenya, the work those women did helped cast away antiquated gender roles and female domesticity. Maathai was able to understand the intimate connection between environmental degradation and socioeconomic concerns in Kenya.
At our climactic dinner, I would love to discuss the intricate connectivity of global socioeconomic and political challenges with environmental issues. Her insight into identifying the root of a problem in society and her success with the Green Belt movement, now present across Africa, would propagate discussion on possible solutions to global crises including land misuse and mass extinction of species. In turn, I would debate with Maathai the difficulties of enacting ideological and physical changes in a well-established and developed society as opposed to the developing society in which she lived.
Wangari Maathai and I both understand the necessity of saving the environment and its societal implications. From the rainforests of Borneo to the deserts of Mexico, humanity is embroiled in this struggle for sustainability. A dinner with Maathai would be an extraordinary opportunity for us to tackle these issues and, with a little luck, begin to save planet Earth.