"There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting"

Wangari Maathai’s words indict a mindset that treats nature as expendable and the future as someone else’s problem. Calling it a “general culture” exposes how environmental harm is not merely the work of a few bad actors but a social norm reinforced by policy, profit, and habit. Trees become a resource to be extracted rather than a living infrastructure that stabilizes soils, regulates water, moderates climate, and anchors community livelihoods. When cutting becomes ordinary and planting becomes exceptional, a society writes decline into its own routine.

Her anger is ethical as much as ecological. It is anger at short-termism that cashes out today’s forests for quick gains while externalizing the costs to women walking farther for firewood and water, to farmers facing eroded fields, and to children inheriting a diminished landscape. It is anger at a collective action failure in which “everyone” participates in depletion but no one shoulders the responsibility of renewal. The imbalance between cutting and planting is a moral asymmetry: consumption without reciprocity.

Embedded in her frustration is a blueprint. Planting is not just a technical fix; it is a cultural shift toward stewardship. It demands institutions that protect commons, incentives that reward restoration, and civic courage to resist corrupt deals and destructive development. Maathai’s Green Belt Movement modeled this by mobilizing local communities, especially women, to reclaim degraded land, earn livelihoods, and build democratic voice. Planting a tree becomes an act of citizenship, an insistence that the future must be actively made.

Her contrast between cutting and planting also speaks beyond forestry. It questions any economy that prizes extraction over regeneration, any politics that spends social capital faster than it is renewed. The call is to convert anger into organized care: to teach, legislate, and finance a culture where the default is to replenish what we use, so that those who come after inherit shade, not stumps.