Wangari Maathai, a professor of biology at Nairobi University in Kenya, could simply enjoy the prestige and security of being a highly educated, well-paid woman in a country where most women lead far different lives. Instead, she founded a movement that has set out to transform those women’s lives and the entire economy of her nation. This is clearly a positive mission, but it has put Maathai in great personal danger.

Her Green Belt Movement has enlisted over 80,000 rural women in planting and tending over 20 million trees. Everywhere that the movement is strong, the villages and the countryside are green with gracious trees that give bananas, mangoes, and papayas to people who remember starvation and malnutrition. The people in these areas see that their own local women have brought about this transformation to health, beauty and economic independence. But to the one-party government of strongman Daniel Arap Moi, such independence is “subversive.”