The theme of the International Women’s Day 2026, #GiveToGain, comes with a sense of urgency as a climate crisis. Still, behind that hurry, there is another fact that is older and stiller: Give to Gain. Forestry practitioners have known it to be a principle; you return to the land, you plant, you defend, you heal it back, and the land heals you. Clean water. Stable soils. Breathable air. Community resilience. Life.
What the world is gradually gaining to realize is what women have knowingly done over decades, which is environmental stewardship is no sacrifice. It is an investment and women have been the steadiest investors. Wangari Maathai knew this. The theory was not launched by the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She started with an issue, deforested slopes, parched streams, women walking longer and further to find firewood and water and a radical idea that the women who were nearest to the earth were also the women who were best able to restore it. She used the Green Belt Movement to mobilize the communities to plant more than 50 million trees in Kenya. Not policy briefs or resolutions of conferences, but the undignified work of women planting seedlings in the soil. Give to the land. Gain everything.
As a woman studying forestry, some days it is beautiful work, morning dawn in misty reserves, the silence of the bird searching for a tree species by its bark, and the joy of a good regeneration survey. And there are other days. The days when you are climbing up the hill with equipment in the forest that does not decide it is your day. The days of the person, who is so well-meaning, who says something that maybe a bit much for you, and who points now and then aimlessly out at the mud, and the distance and the heat. We stayed anyway. We measured anyway. And in some parts of that education, we had been turned into that which the textbooks do not directly describe: women who learn to think that the
health of the ecosystem and the health of the
community are one and the same thing.
Go on a reforestation endeavor, consider who is minding the nurseries, who is managing the community land bargains, who is documenting which native species are becoming extinct and which ones are becoming renewed. You will find women. Often without formal titles, and frequently the unrecognized support of programs which are gaining global recognition.
When women are safe in land tenure and they make their own choices, when women are taught about forestry, it increases the speed of the ecological knowledge transfer between generations. Whether women were able to do this work was never in question. The question is whether the systems they are surrounded by will provide them with the resources, the recognition and the power to do it on scale and we are still asking it.
To the woman in the edge of the forest with a seedling in her hand:
To the graduate in the forestry, who was informed that it was too physical, too remote, too technical, too anything, and who made herself master of it all after all:
To the community forester whose name will not be published in the journal article but whose expertise enabled it to be possible:
To this girl in school to-day, studying the taxonomy of trees, planning her first transect, wondering what it would be to give to this land her life:
You are not so much in an area, which has just been accommodating of your entry. You are continuing a lineage. You are an heir of an ancient, breathing race of women who have known intuitively and scientifically, - that to take care of forests is to take care of the future.
The work is not easy. It is not supposed to be easy. However, there is a certain delight in seeing one stand in a forest one helped plant, seeing the canopy around them feel the cool air, the bird-song, the diffused light is partially yours. You have bestowed upon it, and it has returned.
That is the promise. That is the practice. We are making an inheritance of that.
Author
Oyindamola Olatundun OluwaseunÂ
