The Globe and Mail: Embrace creation's diversity, Nobel laureate urges world

The Globe and Mail: Embrace creation's diversity, Nobel laureate urges world

Associated Press

Oslo — The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize accepted her award Friday to the beat of drums and dancers that broke with the usual stodgy ceremony, and urged her audience “to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder.”

But Kenyan Wangar Maathai warned that if the environment is not protected, peace would forever remain endangered.

“Today, we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system,” she said. “We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder,”

“This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process,” the 64-year-old Kenyan environmental activist said after receiving the traditional gold medal and diploma that accompanies the cash prize valued at about $1.8-million Canadian.

“You are an extraordinary example for women throughout Africa, throughout the world,” Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in his speech.

Before she took the stage, the traditionally rigid and formal ceremony lit up with colour and sound as three African dancers and accompanying drummers pounded out a brief piece of African music that echoed off the walls of the large auditorium.

The audience included hundreds of dignitaries, including the Norwegian Royal Family. The peace prize is presented in Oslo, while the other Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm on the same day.

“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other,” said Ms. Maathai. “That time is now.”

As she spoke in English, many in the crowded auditorium, flowers lining the elevated blue stage, nodded their heads in agreement.

Her selection by the five-member Nobel Committee raised eyebrows because of her environmental ties and also because of controversy over statements she purportedly made asserting that AIDS was a laboratory-created ailment loosed upon Africa by the West.

But she told Associated Press that her comments about AIDS being created to destroy Africans were misquoted and taken out of context.

In a statement released by the Nobel Committee, she said: “It is therefore critical for me to state that I neither say nor believe that the virus was developed by white people or white powers in order to destroy the African people. Such views are wicked and destructive.”

Mr. Danbolt Mjoes said the committee's decision was a logical one.

“Environmental protection is another path toward peace,” he said as told the audience about Ms. Maathai's accomplishments. “There are connections between peace on the one hand and an environment on the other in which rare resources like oil, water, minerals and timber are fought over.”

Referring to the dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbours over water as well as deforestation in the Darfur region of Sudan, he said: “Wars and conflicts certainly have other, many causes, but who would deny that inequitable distribution, either locally or internally, is relevant in this connection.”

Ms. Maathai, the first Kenyan to win the award, was selected for her role in founding the Green Belt Movement, which has sought to empower women, improve the environment and fight corruption in Africa for nearly 30 years.

A deputy environment minister in the Kenyan government, Ms. Maathai also won acclaim for her campaign to fight deforestation by planting 30 million trees in Africa.

The award committee “has challenged the world to broaden the understanding of peace: there can be no peace without equitable development; and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space,” Ms. Maathai said. “This shift is an idea whose time has come.”

The Nobel Prizes are always presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of their creator, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.