CAPITOL IDEAS: Nobel Farce
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL Nobel Farce TAKE A CLOSER LOOK at this year's Nobel Peace Prize. It was awarded to Wangari Maathai, a 64-year-old woman from Kenya, and I admit to being...
...The hydrogen bomb...
...Privatizing is the only rational solution...
...We are told that Mrs...
...For many women, tree planting is now a good deed that also helps make ends meet...
...Perhaps an independent-minded reporter can investigate them...
...That is not many by the standards of the U.S...
...she has a Doctor of Laws degree from Williams College...
...Then she put her foot in it again...
...For it is the existence of communal lands that generates wars between adjacent groups and tribes...
...Anyone can come along at any time and say "that tree is my tree, and I'm going to cut it down right now...
...She has been the cat's-paw of the American academy...
...Fuel for cooking would be replenished...
...She has been the cat's-paw of the American academy, and now the honoree of the Norwegian Academy...
...In Kenya and in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, deforestation and denudation of the landscape is proceeding apace...
...To have been "beaten and jailed during the regime of" is a precondition for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize at all, but maybe it is true...
...Maathai, Bella Abzug's one-time friend...
...The whole thing looks like a deception that the Nobel committee fell for...
...In newspaper story after newspaper story, we were told that these ladies succeeded in planting 30 million trees over three decades...
...How to cope with her indiscretion...
...And so should Teller have been honored, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991...
...Lurking behind the press publicity has been the suggestion that the real goal of her movement was not so much tree-planting as preventing the privatization of public lands...
...Okay...
...But that is not how the prize is seen today...
...Many women wondered why Dr...
...Trees take years to grow...
...No doubt American universities have helped fatten Mrs...
...How to decide which women get paid for which trees (and again, where does the money come from...
...That (it seems) was what Moi's cronies were doing, admittedly by a procedure that was undemocratic...
...Maathai gave "jobs" to 10,000 women, who were able to make money by transferring seedlings from nurseries into the ground and then supervising their growth...
...The background to the story is partlybelievable...
...Glum were the State Department functionaries, who had been eager to add to the chorus of praise...
...Understandably, these organs did not want to let their readers know that this new African heroine, whose thoughts on the environment so closely matched theirs, was, in fact, a nut...
...The late and great physicist, Edward Teller...
...It was awarded to Wangari Maathai, a 64-year-old woman from Kenya, and I admit to being suspicious of the claims made Jon her behalf...
...It was designed as a "tool to control Africans...
...And to do this on public lands...
...forest industry, which planted 720 million trees in 1997...
...It would be par for the course in post-colonial Africa...
...The Washington Post showed the way...
...In her buttercup-yellow dresses, she advertises herself as all-African...
...That is the tragedy of the commons—still underway in Africa...
...I doubt whether she planted a single tree...
...I haven't been able to determine how much the Green Belt Movement received, but the ADF says that grants to any group should not exceed $250,000...
...With the award of the prize to Wangari Maathai, Nobel's aspirations have been further degraded...
...Journalists all used the same press releases and cliches: lone voice, holistic approach, sustainable development, resisting Western stereotypes, confronting the powerful, etc...
...DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59...
...Everyone has the same incentive...
...We are told that she founded something called the Green Belt Movement in Nairobi in 1977, enlisting poor women to plant millions of trees to combat deforestation...
...She attended a university in Germany, too, and has won a Petra Kelly Award...
...Published in Science in 1968, it argued that resources owned in common are always overexploited unless population is restricted...
...If so, she is actually inflaming conflict...
...started with just a handful of seedlings in her backyard...
...The right to the wood is undefined so you had better grab it quickly...
...By that criterion, what invention kept the peace through the Cold War...
...Mjoes, said without irony: "She thinks globally and acts locally...
...Along comes Mrs...
...Rabin paid for it with his life...
...The New York Times gave it a well-buried mention...
...You haul the wood into your hut—privatize it—before someone else does...
...Maathai's bank account...
...Maathai said that the virus that is said to cause it was created by scientists "for biological warfare...
...Further, we are told that the former president, Daniel arap Moi (always singled out among African tyrants for having been "corrupt," as though others were not), allowed his cronies to take possession of "public lands," thereby profiting...
...It is seen as an opportunity to reward those whose good intentions have inspired them to take actions that are often foolish and may pose grave risks to their own interests...
...All the confrontthe-powerful talk is intended to disguise her university provenance...
...For every tree that takes root, the woman who planted it earns a small sum...
...Well, Mrs...
...She had earlier told a Times reporter: "We're trying to empower people, to let them identify their mistakes, to show them they can build, or destroy the environment:" Something is wrong there...
...Has anyone heard of the "free-rider problem...
...In a worshipful article in the New York Times, Marc Lacey wrote: Her movement...
...Maathai was so devoted to saving trees...
...This was plainly seen in the case of Israel's prime minister Yitzak Rabin, who was awarded the prize in 1994 for allowing himself to be sucked into a misnamed "peace process" with an insincere partner, Yasser Arafat...
...The Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, were funded by a Swedish industrialist, Alfred Nobel, who had invented dynamite...
...There were 6,000 of them in Kenya alone, according to a piece of printed devotion by Frances Moore Lappe in the International Herald Tribune...
...I doubt whether she or her lady helpers ever planted a single tree...
...It grew to include hundreds of tree nurseries throughout Africa, where seedlings are doled out to women, who plant them on both public and private lands...
...In fact, his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Sakharov, often called the father of the Soviet H-bomb, did receive the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1975...
...That I do believe...
...she was a visiting scholar at the Yale School of Environmental Studies...
...For such an inventor to fund a peace award may seem incongruous, but Nobel himself said that with the existence of dynamite, "warmongers would have no choice but to seek peace with one another...
...Maathai's AIDS absurdities...
...Mrs...
...And the media...
...Scholastica College in Kansas, a master's from the University of Pittsburgh, a doctorate from Nairobi...
...taxpayer-funded African Development Foundation (ADF), created by the U.S...
...In Emily Wax's admiring story, there was no mention at all of Mrs...
...It makes no sense...
...I was wondering the same thing...
...The rather pathetic Norwegian committee chairman, a certain Prof...
...For the sake of argument I am prepared to accept that, too...
...And here is the unbelievable part...
...Maathai was surely on the receiving end of rebukes from Dartmouth, Williams, and Yale...
...and lately she has been hobnobbing with the enviros at Dartmouth...
...The virus was meant to "wipe out the black race," she said...
...With a growing population, public lands will become denuded, for reasons that were explained in a famous paper, "The Tragedy of the Commons...
...ik Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...By chance I found out that her organization received a grant from the U.S...
...Who paid for those nurseries...
...She was "beaten and jailed during the regime of President Moi...
...CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL Nobel Farce ET'S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK at this year's Nobel Peace Prize...
...Congress in 1985...
...But she has one degree from St...
...We have heard of AIDS in Africa, right...
...This time, however, tragedy turned into farce...
...Who, then, was the most unjustly neglected candidate for the peace prize in our time...
...It goes to groups who want to "abolish" nuclear weapons, as though that were possible...
...She is a creation of the academic world, the American academy in particular...
...Placatingly, she said that she had intended "to promote an inquiring attitude...
...It is awarded, exclusively, to people who express pious hopes for peace...
...13 UT TRAGEDY SOON TURNED TO COMEDY...
...Maathai departed from the script, embarrassing her Western feminist puppeteers...
...Nor was there in the International Herald Tribune, nor in the BBC's report...
...Maathai's 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 TOM BETHELL background particularly aroused my suspicion...
Vol. 37 • December 2004 • No. 10
