http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/041008/photos_en/mdf721232By Alister Doyle
OSLO (Reuters) - Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, honored for aiding democracy and seeking to save the continent's shrinking forests.
"It cannot get any better than this -- maybe in heaven," Maathai told Reuters after learning of the award. She wept with delight and planted a tree in her home town of Nyeri in the shadow of Mount Kenya, Africa's second highest peak.
The award marks a new environmental theme in interpreting the 1895 will of Swedish philanthropist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who founded the prestigious prize. Until now it has often gone to people seeking to end armed conflicts.
"Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The prize is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.36 million) and will be handed out in Oslo on December 10.
"We have emphasized the environment, democracy building and human rights and especially women's rights," Mjoes said of the prize. "We have added a new dimension to the concept of peace."
Maathai's Green Belt Movement, comprised mainly of women, says it has planted 30 million trees across Africa to combat creeping deforestation that often deepens poverty.
Mjoes said the movement also worked for family planning, nutrition and a fight against corruption in Kenya. And Maathai said that her grassroots movement could be a pre-emptive strike to safeguard peace.
"Many wars in the world are actually fought over natural resources," she told NRK Norwegian radio. "In managing our resources ... we plant the seeds of peace, both now and in the future."
GREEN THEME
But some experts were unconvinced by the new green theme.
"This prize could be positive in expanding the concept of security, but it could also mean a dilution of the prize, moving too far away from the original idea," said researcher Espen Barth Eide at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.
He had tipped the U.N. nuclear watchdog and its head, Mohamed ElBaradei for the award to reflect global fears that terrorists or rogue states might obtain nuclear arms.
But others argued that the environment could be a key to global security. Tree plantings slow desertification, preserve forest habitats for wildlife and provide a source of fuel, building materials and food for future generations.
"Understanding is growing throughout the world of the close links between environmental protection and global security," said Klaus Toepfer, head of the U.N. Environment Program, in hailing the award.
And trees soak up carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. Many environmental experts say global warming could be the biggest threat to life on the planet, with more deserts, storms and rising sea levels.
Maathai, born in 1940, is a zoology professor who rose to international fame for campaigns against government-backed forest clearances in Kenya in the late 1980s and 1990s.
She is the 12th woman peace laureate since the first award was made in 1901. The last African laureate was U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan (news - web sites), of Ghana, in 2001. The 2003 prize also went to a woman, Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi.
Experts estimate British colonialists and Kenyan farmers have cleared about 75 percent of woodlands in the last 150 years, leaving two percent of Kenya's land under forest cover.
In 1989 Maathai's protests forced then President Daniel arap Moi to abandon a personal plan to erect a 62-storey office tower in a Nairobi park. In 1999 she was beaten and whipped by private security guards during a demonstration against the sale of forest land near the capital Nairobi.
In 2001, the 100th anniversary of the first award, the committee mapped out possible new themes for peace.
Geir Lundestad, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said at the time that the award might shift in its second century to honor new types of activists such as environmentalists, rock stars, perhaps even journalists.
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