Prior to her death, she was inexplicably exposed to extremely high levels of plutonium. Karen had learned to routinely test herself for exposure, but nothing prepared her for the discoveries made by the Healthy Physics Office upon her request. Although no plutonium was found on any surfaces in the lab she was working in, her apartment was found to have been contaminated. Starting with a measure of 1 disintegrations per minute or dpms as the lowest possible positive result, these measurements were found in her house, according to PBS’ online information site: 400,000 dpm on a package of bologna and cheese in the fridge, 25,000 on the stove sides, 6,000 on a package of chicken, and 100,000 on the toilet seat. After her death, an autopsy determined that Karen Silkwood’s exposure to plutonium had been very recent and the plant could never come up with an explanation for her exposure. A year after her death, the plant closed.
The speculation surrounding her death has never stopped, but proof of company malfeasance has remained inconclusive. It is known, however, that it was Kerr-McGee who sold rods to the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, where defective fuel rods broke down and released radioactivity into the atmosphere.
Wangari Maathai: Green Goddess
Wangari Maathai is a remarkable woman. She set her sights on saving the farmlands, forests, and grasslands of the most politically unstable continent she calls home—Africa. To that end, she has started the Green Belt Movement. “We wanted to emphasize that by cutting trees, removing vegetation, having this soil erosion, we were literally stripping the Earth of its color,” she remarks.
Wangari comes from a sacred spot for all of mankind; the rural village she was born in is beside the Great Rift Valley, the birthplace of the first humans who walked upright. Many call Wangari’s home the cradle of life. Early on, she was instructed by her mother about the importance and sanctity of land and that which grows upon it, especially trees. In 1960, she left her village and took a scholarship offered to Kenyans by the United States. She found higher education to be very much her bailiwick, receiving a master of science from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate from the University of Nairobi, the first woman ever to do so. She then went on to rack up a number of other firsts in her homeland, including becoming the University of Nairobi’s first female professor, first department chair, and first woman in the anatomy department.
Even though she enjoyed a happy marriage to a member of Kenya’s Parliament, had a thriving career, and was raising three children, she still found time to become involved with women’s rights. Her Kikuyu background was different from the district in Nairobi her husband was assigned to. As a Kikuyu woman, Wangari had been free to express her opinions and be actively involved in village affairs. In Nairobi, she was regarded as much too uppity for her own good. Proving them right, Wangari decided to run for Parliament and quit her job at the university to work full-time on her campaign. When she was told she was ineligible to run for Parliament because she was a woman, the university refused to hire her back.
Wangari then turned her prodigious energy to the environment. On World Environment Day in 1977, she and her supporters planted seven trees in a public park and laid the foundation for the Green Belt movement. Put down by many, and even beaten with clubs, she was accused of throwing her education and talent away. This time, she proved everybody wrong. Wangari discovered that only 3 percent of the Kenyan forest was still standing. As a result, Kenyan villagers were suffering malnutrition, erosion of their farmland, and the subsequent loss of water as springs and creeks dried up. She quite accurately foresaw famine and environmental disaster unless trees were again planted to restore the environment to its natural state. Wangari traveled throughout Kenya, teaching village women how to plant trees and how to start them from seeds they collected. Soon children got involved in the Green Belt planting projects, and by 1988, more than 10,000 trees were planted.
Wangari’s brilliant strategy is simple. She doesn’t try to convert villagers to the program. She waits for word of the good work and practical results to spread and, soon enough, the Green Belters are asked to come to another area. In addition to helping to stem the tide of complete destruction of Kenya’s ecosystem, Wangari’s Green Belt movement has provided many economic opportunities for Kenya’s women.
Over the years, Wangari Maathai has received greater recognition for founding the Green Belt movement than any parliamentary seat would have provided. She has received many awards, become a Nobel Laureate, received a “Woman of the World” award from Diana, Princess of Wales, and the encouragement to continue her invaluable work in the regreening of Africa’s precious heartland.
“One person can make the difference.”
— Wangari Maathai
Tree-Huggers Unite!
The Chipko movement in India began in 1973 when a group of Indian women protested a government action to log near their village. When the loggers decided on a different spot, the women went there to stop the tree-cutting. In a country where widows are still burned with their dead husbands in some places, this concerted action is truly courageous. A year later, the tree action moved to yet another location. Gaura Devi, a respected elder and widow from the village of Reni, was tipped off by a little girl herding cows that loggers were on the way. Gaura flew into action and got a troop of women. When a logger threatened Devi with a gun, she replied with a fierce calm, “Shoot us. Only then will you be able to cut down the forest.” From this point on, the strength of the Chipko movement increased tremendously and even got requests from men to join. Chipko means “to hug;” these grassroots environmentalists encircle their trees, holding hands to protecting their fellow beings from destruction.
Judi Bari: Shero of the Forest Movement
The day after Judi Bari died, someone wearing an Earth First! t-shirt lowered the Willits Post Office Flag to half-mast. The flag stayed grieving until the postmaster put it back up some time later. The postmaster had to do a lot of raising the flag that week because every day the flag was lowered until the day of her wake, when the city hall flag stayed at half-mast for the day.
Judi was loved because she was an inspiration; she was admired and vilified because she was a great organizer. She knew how to organize all kinds of people—hippie kids to homesteaders—into an alliance that, by 1991, was beginning to include loggers and other timber workers. And for this she was bombed. She has the astute sense when to invoke the neighborhood and when not to. And for this she was bombed. She had the principled courage to stand in the face of macho Earth First!-ers and renounce tree-spiking; and she continued to do this in spite of being crippled and in chronic, unrepairable pain for the last six years of her life.
Here was the shero’s journey: to achieve the respect and honor due her work from loggers and other timber workers. Loggers who were tired of slogging right and left to cut baby trees to make a living; millworkers who saw that the company didn’t care for them any more than it cared for the forest. She brought them to understand that the company was cutting them out of a job; she was good at pointing out that putting the quarterly report before the health of the forest would destroy it for our children. And workers were beginning to understand her message; and “Big Timber” couldn’t stand that kind of message, so she was bombed. By somebody who is still out there.
A veritable army of people, whose desire to vilify Judi seemed endless, was led by the FBI, which labeled her a terrorist, charged her with bombing herself, and accused her one month before her death of faking cancer to gain sympathy from the public. Why on earth, why? I believe it was because she espoused and lived by a philosophy she called “biocentrism,” which holds that humankind as a species is only one of a continuum, an organism, and therefore had little right to exploit the resources of the planet to the resources’ destruction. She believed that giant corporations were betraying the public trust by the extraction of resources for obscene profit; naturally, this was appalling to those guardians of corporate America. So, if bombers could not destroy her body, then the FBI would destroy her reputation. If she could not be stopped from forming an alliance with workers,