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.

0 Environmental change: Impacts on people

The vulnerability of communities to environmental change is a major setback to sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa. One of the impacts of human vulnerability to environmental change is the forced movement of people, creating what has come to be known as environmental refugees. The notion of environmental refugees describes a new insight on an old phenomenon-large numbers of the world's least secure people seeking refuge from insecure biophysical environments. Although the phrase 'environmental refugee' is controversial among advocates of the classical definition of refugees (political and social), it has gained in popular usage. It has  been estimated that, globally, there were 25 million environmental refugees in 2000, more than half of whom were in Africa.

Nduma, commonly grow along the streams

In more recent times and in most areas, though there is no physical movement of people, environmental and climate changes continues to erode families bottom-lines. As is the case of Gakui stream, many farmers relied on its water for domestic purposes, watering animals, and small-scale vegetable farming along the stream. They would fetch some income from sale of vegetables in situ or ex situ local markets. Now that the streams are drying up, these practices are no longer possible. The rural household's incomes are too drying up together with the streams and rivers. They are now kind of ‘economic refugees’ in their own land.

I wonder aloud.......how can you and me help the farmers restore the streams' flow and their income too? Has it happened in your area, county, or country. Tell me you story, post a comment.

0 Environmental degradation - Root causes

The environment is life, supporting people and other living things. Environment is widely recognized as a 'pillar' of sustainable development. It provides essential goods and services which contribute to meeting basic human needs, and is essential to human development and quality of life. It provides services to ecosystems, including water catchments which protect freshwater resources, wetlands, riverbank environments, biodiversity habitats and ecologically functioning landscapes. The environment is also a sink of the wastes generated from different human activities. 
The root causes of environmental change have both natural (mainly climatic variations and climate change) and human-made factors, and include interactions between them. Global processes are having a tremendous influence on environmental change in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and their impact on climate variability and change. These changes have not only regional to national dimensions, but also local implications as well. In Kenya like most of the Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a high dependency on agro-sylvoecological systems, which themselves depend on the state of the environment and local climatical conditions. 

Anthropogenic causes of environmental degradation at local level include deforestation, overgrazing, unplanned land management, firewood harvesting and urbanization, and encroachment of wetlands and rangelands for cultivation among others. With a population growth rate of 4%, Kenya has to come up with strategies to manage its environment and natural resources better to support food production to feed the nation, or slow down the infrastructural development to channel funds to import food. Maybe some drastic measures like 'a two child-policy per family' could help!' The process of environmental degradation is generally considered to be slow, but rapid changes in the state of an ecosystem can occur due to positive feedback loops that amplify initial small stochastic changes in conditions, resulting in runaway reactions in the ecosystem. This appears to be where we are as a nation, and we need to heed to call of wisdom. Albert Schweiter said “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end up destroying the earth" and himself.