Eco-Activism and Civil Resistance: Rethinking Ecological Sustainability in Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed

Tarimoweni Justline Egule

doi:10.56201/rjhcs.v12.no5.2026.pg8.19

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Eco-Activism and Civil Resistance: Rethinking Ecological Sustainability in Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed

Tarimoweni Justline Egule

Abstract

This study examines the intersection of eco-activism and civil resistance in Wangari Maathai’s memoir Unbowed: A Memoir (2007), arguing that Maathai’s environmental philosophy constitutes a coherent and theoretically significant paradigm of nonviolent ecological resistance with enduring implications for African environmental thought and practice. Drawing on ecocriticism and postcolonial ecocriticism as complementary theoretical frameworks, the study analyses two primary modes of ecological intervention deployed in the memoir: agrarian activism through the Green Belt Movement’s tree-planting campaigns, and correspondence resistance through strategic written communication directed at state authorities, the media, and international organisations. The study demonstrates that Maathai’s agrarian activism reclaims indigenous ecological knowledge as a form of decolonised environmental practice, while her correspondence resistance exposes the complicity of neo-colonial governance in ecological destruction and mobilises public opinion both locally and internationally. The paper further argues that these two modes of resistance are not separate strategies but mutually reinforcing dimensions of a single, principled ecological vision grounded in the conviction that environmental sustainability and social justice are inseparable. The study concludes that Maathai’s memoir offers an indispensable model of community-led, nonviolent ecological resistance that remains urgently relevant to contemporary African environmental activism, postcolonial governance, and global environmental justice discourse.

Keywords

Wangari MaathaiEco-activismCivil ResistancePostcolonial EcocriticismGreen Kenya

References

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Eco-Activism and Civil Resistance: Rethinking Ecological Sustainability in Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed

Abstract

Keywords

References

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