Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, delivered the commencement address at Connecticut College in 2006. Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, which had planted over thirty million trees across Africa, used her speech to articulate the powerful connection between environmental stewardship and peace that the Norwegian Nobel Committee had recognized. She argued that virtually every conflict, when you look beneath the surface politics of ethnicity, greed, and corruption, is fundamentally a conflict over resources — how they are shared, who has access, who is excluded. From local disputes in Kenya to the genocide in Darfur, the pattern was the same. Her vision was both practical and prophetic: peace cannot be achieved without just and sustainable management of the planet's finite resources.