Green Belt Movement’s effectiveness rested on three deliberate strategies of symbolic and intersectional politics.

Evidence

The Green Belt Movement’s achievements in engaging the violence of deforestation and soil erosion flowed from three critical strategies. First, tree planting served not only as a practical response to an attritional environmental calamity but to create, in addition, a symbolic hub for political resistance and for media coverage of an otherwise amorphous issue. Second, the movement was able to articulate the discourse of violent land loss to a deeper narrative of territorial theft, as perpetrated first by British colonialists and later by their neocolonial legatees. Third, the Green Belt Movement made strategic use of what one might call intersectional environmentalism, broadening their base and credibility by aligning themselves with—and stimulating—other civil rights campaigns that were not expressly environmental, like the campaigns for women’s rights, for the release of political prisoners, and for greater political transparency. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 373

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘intersectional environmentalism’ as aligning environmental action with non-environmental civil-rights campaigns — a portable concept for the polyad.