0 Eat Mother Nature at your own peril

'It's Our Turn To Eat!' or so Michela Wrong's Githongo story went! Back to our subject, Mother Nature is calm, serene and cool and will not raise a finger as we go about destroying her. We can almost have our field day on it, excising and clearing forests to grow tea,  'that it's better than the trees', doing legal and illegal logging, burning charcoal, cultivating up-slope and on the river-banks, approving buildings in urban riparian areas and on top of rivers, building roads through wetlands and dying to justify it, tolerating people in the forests and debating all the year-long how to compensate them, and whether their Title Deeds are legal or fake, Okaying projects in highly fragile ecosystems – that they will produce sweeter sugar than where sugar normally grows, and clearing forests to build a dams for HEP Plants, as if the dams will not 'need the forests', and so goes the wanton destruction of Kenya’s environment without any thought of tomorrow. EIA  is free public show. 'Watoto kaeni chini' Factual Films presents......'Myopic Action'
It is like eating poison! Then Grrrrrrrrrh*&^%, Mother Nature wakes up and fights back. Rains starts to fail, becomes more unpredictable, unreliable and scarce, rivers dries up, thus no water in the taps – meaning increased risks for preventable diseases like cholera, dysentery and others especially to the many Kenyans living under a dollar a day, no water for irrigation - thus no food and the government has to look up for like KES 37 Billion to fund food budget (and because donors know it is us partly to blame, and partly climate change which is not a domain of Kenya alone, they are slow in responding to aid). For many are good at preventing fires in the first place, not quenching them when it is too late; no electricity as Masinga HEP Plant shuts down among others – meaning industries runs sub-optimally thus has to cut jobs.

While degrading our environment, it’s like we have been eating poison; then we start writhing in pain as the active ingredients starts to work on our bodies. Depending on the dosage, we die or thereafter live with damaged organs. Restoration while possible cannot take back an ecosystem like Mau Forest Complex to where it was before the ‘plunder’. But it is the noblest thing we can do and forever cherish.