Daily Inspiration Quote by Wangari Maathai

Blame is a renewable resource, and Wangari Maathai is calling out who gets to spend it. The line opens with a disarming “we,” implicating the audience in a comfortable habit: pointing at the poor as if poverty itself were a kind of ecological vice. That phrasing matters. “Very fond” isn’t neutral; it’s a gentle sneer at a moral pastime that lets affluent societies keep their self-image intact while the damage continues.

Maathai’s pivot - “But often” - is strategically calibrated. She’s not offering a sentimental defense of the poor or pretending local practices can’t harm ecosystems. She’s naming the asymmetry of power. The poor may cut trees for fuel because they’re trapped in short-term survival. The powerful clear forests for cash crops, mining, and infrastructure; they write the rules that make extraction profitable; they deploy police and permits to turn communal land into “development.” In her formulation, environmental destruction isn’t primarily a failure of individual virtue. It’s a consequence of governance, incentives, and who holds the machinery of decision-making.

The context is Maathai’s lifelong work with the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, where reforestation was never just “planting trees.” It was a challenge to authoritarian state power, land grabs, and the elite capture of resources that leaves ordinary people holding both the economic bag and the ecological blame. The quote works because it flips the script: environmentalism isn’t a scolding campaign aimed downward. It’s an accountability project aimed up.