Kenya

Editors Note: Kenyan Environmentalist Wagari Maathai, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, died Sept. 26.

By John Mbaria
Special to InvestigateWest

I personally knew Professor Wagari Maathai, long before the world had fully acknowledged her struggles. 

I was in university when she took on the Kanu Government for attempting to put up a 60-storey private building in Uhuru Park, the biggest public park. And even though matters environment had not engulfed my inner man, I was fascinated that an ‘ordinary soul’ had dared to go against the wishes of baba na mama (euphemism for the then mighty Kanu Party). Few of us at the University of Nairobi were dedicated to any cause. Although we would find immense excitement as we ganged up to stage riots over issues we thought were important, hardly did environmental issues in general or Wangari Maathai’s causes in particular, feature in our struggles.

Our lives’ journeys were to come to a confluence when I became an environmental reporter with The EastAfrican and later a columnist with Daily Nation. This wasin the early 2000s. Around the time, the regime of the former President Daniel Moi had stubbornly refused to see the sense in sparing the last of the country’s ecosystems. At the time, the ruling party’s intransigence had become legendary. And to crown its folly, the regime came up with one devious anti-environment scheme after another. If it was not the decimation of Karura forest, it was Ngong Forest, if not Ngong, it was Mount Kenya forests, Marmanet, Sirimoni, Kaptagat, Maasai Mau and so on ad nauseum.

This is the final installment of a three-part series on how social and economic interactions between people in the developing world and those in the developed world creates serious implications for fragile ecosystems.  We invite you to join Kenyan journalist John Mbaria on Earth Day as he takes you on a truly "green"  tour that might help you appreciate these issues. He has experienced first hand the struggles of many in Africa who face the consequences of an increasingly warming earth, the destruction of many life-sustaining ecosystems and the failure of political systems and institutions to plan for the consequences of these forces. Mbaria is a trained land use planner and a journalist who previously worked as the environment correspondent with The EastAfrican, a regional weekly read in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. He recently moved to Seattle from Kenya and is a contributing writer to InvestigateWest.

Part three of a series

Through a friend, I contacted officials of a local NGO, the Kenya Community Based Tourism Organization that lobbied for the interests of poor communities who owned land communally and had ventured into Kenya's emerging ecotourism sector.  Taiko Lemayan and David Mombo - both officials of the tourism organization - had made a report that detailed, not the rosy picture often painted about ecotourism, but how it had been used to mask exploitation of communities after they set aside part of their immense ranches for wildlife conservation and leasing it to investors. I was keen to see the report, not simply because it was going against the grain, but also because it was feeding into what I already knew - that something was just not right about business dealings between poor communities and hard-nosed foreign and local investors.

This is the second of a three-part series on how social and economic interactions between people in the developing world and those in the developed world creates serious implications for fragile ecosystems.  We invite you to join Kenyan journalist John Mbaria, who has experienced first hand the struggles of many in Africa who face the consequences of an increasingly warming earth, the destruction of many life-sustaining ecosystems and the failure of political systems and institutions to plan for the consequences of these forces. Mbaria is a trained land use planner and a journalist who previously worked as the environment correspondent with The EastAfrican, a regional weekly read in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. He recently moved to Seattle from Kenya and is a contributing writer to InvestigateWest.

Part two of a three-part series

In my many travels across Kenya, I found enough justification to explode the myth that ecotourism - as practiced there and elsewhere in Africa- is responsible, respectful travel, that is also enabling the poor to bake real bread as well as helping to keep communities happy who communally own the land,.

This is the first of a three-part series on how social and economic interactions between people in the developing world and those in the developed world creates serious implications for fragile ecosystems.  We invite you to join Kenyan journalist John Mbaria on Earth Day as he takes you on a truly "green"  tour that might help you appreciate these issues. He has experienced first hand the struggles of many in Africa who face the consequences of an increasingly warming earth, the destruction of many life-sustaining ecosystems and the failure of political systems and institutions to plan for the consequences of these forces. Mbaria is a trained land use planner and a journalist who previously worked as the environment correspondent with The EastAfrican, a regional weekly read in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. He recently moved to Seattle from Kenya and is a contributing writer to InvestigateWest.

Part one of a series

Long before the world put mass tourism under the spotlight, people had become accustomed to images of truckloads of excited tourists surrounding a pack of sleepy lions or a lone cheetah resting under a tree somewhere in Africa.