Wangari Maathai, Kenya's popular environmental activist who is also the country's deputy environment minister, has won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting poverty by trying to save Africa's shrinking forests. She is the first African woman to be honoured thus. This is also the first Nobel prize given to an environmentalist, marking a new interpretation of Swedish philanthropist Alfred Nobel's will, on the basis of which the prize was constituted.

Despite criticism for digressing from the theme of