October 06, 2026

Bring Your Drop Of Water

I am doing the best I can.

Wangari Maathai, founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, often told the story of a hummingbird that tries to put out a forest fire by carrying single drops of water, while the elephant and other large animals stand by certain that nothing can be done. She used the fable to explain her own response to Kenya's vanishing forests - she could not reverse decades of deforestation in a single day, so she organized women to plant one tree at a time, wherever they actually stood. The story became her signature teaching after she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, when people kept asking how one person could face a crisis as large as climate change. Her answer stayed the same: do not measure yourself against the size of the fire, measure yourself against the drop of water you can carry right now.