By Jeanette Winter
The true story of Wangari Maathai, who came home to a Kenya stripped of its trees and started planting, one seedling at a time, until she'd started a movement and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Wangari grows up in Kenya under trees so thick she can't see the sky. She goes away to America to study, and when she comes home the trees are gone. The hills are bare, the soil is washing away, the women walk further and further for firewood. So she plants nine seedlings in her backyard. Then she pays other women to plant them too, a few coins per tree that lives, and the seedlings spread across the country. Men laugh at her. When she stands in front of the bulldozers coming for the last of the forest, she's beaten and thrown in jail. She gets out and keeps planting. Thirty million trees later, she wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
It answers the question a child always asks about the earth, which is 'but what could one person even do.' The answer here is nine seedlings, and then it shows the arithmetic. It's also the rare book on this subject where the person is African and the fix is African, without a single outsider arriving to help. And it's short enough to read to a class in ten minutes and still leave everyone with something.