"I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests"
About this Quote
Maathai doesn’t offer comfort; she offers triage. The line opens with a concession designed to disarm: she acknowledges the raw, immediate harm of “sawmills close” and “people lose jobs.” That specificity matters. It signals she’s not an abstract environmentalist scolding from a distance but someone who recognizes how ecological policy lands hardest on workers and rural communities. Then she pivots to the hard hinge of the quote: “we have to make a choice.” No technocratic hedging, no win-win fantasy. It’s moral clarity framed as necessity.
The subtext is a rebuke to the usual development script, where forests are “resources” until they’re gone and water becomes a crisis headline. By pairing “water” with “these forests,” Maathai compresses an entire ecological argument into a commonsense syllogism: forests aren’t scenery, they’re infrastructure. They hold soil, regulate rainfall, protect watersheds. In other words, you can’t bargain for jobs with a future that has no reliable water supply.
Context sharpens the stakes. As the founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Maathai fought deforestation tied to patronage, land grabs, and state-backed exploitation. So “choice” also points at power: who benefits from logging, who pays when rivers dry up, who gets to define “development.” The rhetorical force lies in refusing to let short-term employment be used as a moral shield for long-term extraction. She’s asking listeners to accept a political reality many leaders avoid saying out loud: real sustainability isn’t painless, but collapse is worse and far less democratic.
The subtext is a rebuke to the usual development script, where forests are “resources” until they’re gone and water becomes a crisis headline. By pairing “water” with “these forests,” Maathai compresses an entire ecological argument into a commonsense syllogism: forests aren’t scenery, they’re infrastructure. They hold soil, regulate rainfall, protect watersheds. In other words, you can’t bargain for jobs with a future that has no reliable water supply.
Context sharpens the stakes. As the founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Maathai fought deforestation tied to patronage, land grabs, and state-backed exploitation. So “choice” also points at power: who benefits from logging, who pays when rivers dry up, who gets to define “development.” The rhetorical force lies in refusing to let short-term employment be used as a moral shield for long-term extraction. She’s asking listeners to accept a political reality many leaders avoid saying out loud: real sustainability isn’t painless, but collapse is worse and far less democratic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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