#oriek

[via Frest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan by Jeffrey Gettleman]

No doubt the Mau Forest is crucial. It is — or more accurately, used to be — a thick, staggeringly beautiful forest in western Kenya, capturing the rains and the mist and, in turn, feeding more than a dozen lakes and rivers across the region, even contributing to the flow of the Nile.

But in the past 15 years, because of ill-planned settlement schemes (the government essentially handed out chunks of forest to cronies), 25 percent of the trees have been wiped out. Much of the forest is now simply meadow. The Ogiek say there are fewer antelope and bees. They constantly use the Kiswahili word “haribika,” which means spoiled. Scientists say the environmental destruction has led to flash floods, micro-climate change, soil erosion and dried up lakes.

The results were painfully obvious this summer when East Africa was hit by one of the worst droughts in years. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, the water taps went dry for weeks. And because Kenya gets a lot of electricity from hydropower, the water shortage meant blackouts, which many Kenyans believe contributed to the recent spike in crime and unemployment.

Suddenly, the Kenyan government seemed to spring into action, commissioning hefty environmental reports and insisting on ejecting all settlers from the Mau Forest so that the government could plant millions of trees and get the country’s water sources churning again. But the sudden environmental altruism has bred suspicion as well. Many Ogiek wonder if Kenyan politicians, notorious as among the world’s most corrupt, are driven by another kind of green.

“The government wants that forest for economic reasons, not conservation reasons,” said Towett Kimaiyo, an Ogiek leader. “The only people who are going to benefit are the saw-millers.”

Almost as if to prove his point, beyond the bird chirps and cow bells tinkling across the smooth green hills was a different noise, a deeper, steadier noise, like a growl: bulldozers, many of them. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that timber companies are continuing to chew up large tracts of the Mau, knocking down giant trees and turning them into doors and plywood for export.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Julius Kavita, this area’s district commissioner, when asked what was going on.