Kenyans can celebrate many benchmarks of progress in our generation. Our children are living longer, we now have free primary education, we have one of the best constitutions in the world, we haven’t eradicated poverty, but we are working on it. But there are still areas we continue to fall short and the most critical to our existence is the continually escalating degradation of our natural environment, and in that is the loss of irreplaceable animal and plant species.
Bomet County is home to a portion of one of Africa’s most vital ecosystems, the Mau Forest and as we have examined in a previous article is under threat of being completely devastated. Tropical rainforests have been described as the thermometer of the planet, therefore as goes the forests so goes Kenya. More than half of the terrestrial plants and animals in the planet live in tropical forests and forests have been called “the main biological library of the earth. Scientists do not even know half of what is contained in this library. The people of Suriname have a proverb that says, ”the rainforest holds answers to questions we have yet to ask.”
The Mau forest is home to one of Kenya’s indigenous people the Ogiek. They have been living in the forest from time immemorial. They are the greatest advocates for conserving the forest as their livelihood is intimately tied to the Forest. The Ogiek would be what is considered as subsistence users of the forest. Their exploitation of the forest is done sustainably and does not cause damage to the forest ecosystem. Of concern is the extraction of trees for fuel and for commercial logging by none Ogiek people.
Forester and Sustainability Activist, Tasso Azevedo reports that are about four billion hectares of forests on earth today. Three quarters of that is in the temperate zone, and the remaining quarter is in the tropics. Most of the biodiversity, 50 percent of the living biomass, the carbon of earth is held in this one quarter, one billion hectares. We have used up six billion hectares of forest to date, this is 50% more than what we had 2,000 years ago. We lost two billion hectares in the last 2,000 years. In the last 100 years, we shifted from deforestation of temperate forests to deforestation of tropical forests. So in 100 years, we lost the same amount of forest in the tropics that we lost in 2,000 years in temperate forests! That is how fast our forests are disappearing.
In Kenya we have a situation where we place a higher value on the trees than we do on the forest as a system. Changing the way we view forests so that we place a premium on the system as a whole as opposed to seeing trees only as a commodity for the market is key to their survival. What would cost us in dollars if the forest disappeared? For example in Bomet County , if we look at the value of forests as a system we will see that most of the tea plantations( our high quality Kenya tea being a major source of our export earnings) in Bomet are adjacent to the Mau forest complex. Forests regulate temperatures and trap and release moisture during the hot dry season and thus provide the even environment required to produce good tea. It makes sense then for the tea industry to be the greatest proponents of preserving the forest as their profit margin is closely tied to proper forestry management practices. Without the forest there would be no tea plantations.
The services provided by the forest (hydroelectric dams fed by the montane forest watersheds, water for agriculture and industry etc.) behoove the private sector to participate in measures to ensure the sustainability of this vital system. We have reached a point where forest services are not free and have a very real dollar value tied to the services it provides. Industry needs to lend its powerful voice to lobby policy makers to enact tougher protection laws.
But in this age of innovation and entrepreneurship there are those who are taking the state of our environment to heart and coming up with solutions to conserve and even begin to regenerate endangered ecosystems. Azevedo founded the Brazilian non-governmental organization Imaflora in 1995 to create alternatives to deforestation. By demonstrating that the health of the Amazon rainforest is directly connected to his country’s economic stability and energy security, he led the implementation of an innovative framework of incentives for sustainable forestry that contributed to reduce the rate of deforestation in the Amazon by 75% and Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions by one-third!
Another ecopreneur is young Shubhendu Sharma a former employee of Toyota India who through what he learnt in the Toyota manufacturing process has invented a system that can compress forest reforestation into a tenth of the time nature would take. He has standardized the process of afforestation, according to him to grow a multilayer forest of 300 trees on an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars for as low as making an iphone. His forestry making platform was inspired by Japanese forester, Akira Miyawaki who is an expert in regenerating native habitats on land devastated by industrialization. He founded Afforestt a for-profit company that works with corporate and government clients on reforestation projects by creating a database that gives anyone in the world a sort of shopping list of native plants they need to seed a new maintenance free forest.
The Ogiek are the greatest champions of conservation in the Mau complex because it is their home, their forest. Unless the rest of us see the Mau Forest as our forest too, and help in the struggle to preserve our Forest which is as critical to our existence as the lungs are to the body, future generations will pay a high price for our lack of proper stewardship. In the words of an anonymous philosopher, “a savage is not one who lives in the forest, but one who destroys it.”