The Challenge for Africa: A Conversation with Wangari Maathai

Discussion Thursday, April 9, 6:30pm Cooper Union The Great Hall 7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue Free and open to the general public Author, activist and Nobel Prize laureate Wangari Maathai discusses the challenge for Africa with Leonard Lopate, WNYC's acclaimed radio host. Maathai offers a compelling look at the problems facing Africa and the promises of the future. She stresses the need for Africans to become self-sufficient, rather than relying foreign benefactors, and to pursue an identity rooted in their own ideals and solutions, instead of Western visions. Maathai is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, which, through networks of rural women, has planted over 30 million trees across Kenya for more than 30 years. In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's Parliament in the first free elections in a generation. In 2003, she was appointed Assistant Minister for Environment, Natural Resources, and Wildlife. She is the author of Unbowed: A Memoir, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and The Experience and The Challenge for Africa. This event is co-sponsored by The Department of Public Programs at The Cooper Union, The Institute for Sustainable Design at the Cooper Union and MillionTreesNYC and is free and open to the public. For more information, call 212.353.4195. http://www.cooper.edu/