Just before Christmas, the Famine Systems Early Warning Network issued a food security alert for Kenya.
Observing that the short rains had largely failed, making the third below-average rainy season, the warning suggested prospects were also poor for the next rains, but the situation was anyway now severe in northern and eastern Kenya.
With pasture and water resources dried up, the network warned 3-4 million Kenyans were set to need humanitarian assistance through 2022, across food, livestock feed, and water.
Yet that rings alarm bells for no one, it seems. A balloon goes up, international bodies must get more food in, the situation is worsening, and, coincidentally, another generation of small children will be deprived of vital micronutrients affecting their physical resilience and intellectual capacities for a lifetime.
But so it goes. Except it doesn’t. I have a therapist friend who was explaining to me recently how a ‘survival’ mindset inevitably leads to scarcity, for those always grabbing the next thing and always believing that doing the same thing will get better results are actually exhibiting a form of psychosis, with their expectations detached from reality.
Hence the oft-quoted film quote about insanity being to do the same thing and expect different results.
So let’s look at the five-year and 10-year prospects for pastoralism in northern and eastern Kenya. Will those increasingly desertified tracts move back into long-term and regular greenery and abundance?But one of the essential gaps in a psychotic commitment to a failing model is to never look ahead — to see where the change will come. For there is no five-year plan that delivers the dreamed abundance when you are just waiting for the same thing to perform differently.
Will climate change stop and rainfall defy the region’s microclimates — with its water towers diminished, its water tables impacted, and its plant life largely obliterated by the overgrazing and now replaced with sand?
Let’s suppose that all scientific norms of the water cycle, whereby established trees and bushes and verdant plant life prevent water runoff — capturing rainfall through root systems and drawing it down into water tables that feed springs that then keep everything watered and growing — doesn’t apply in northern Kenya.
Let’s suppose it finds a way around that, and when the rain falls, it captures the water without any water catchment ecosystem left, it just does (psychosis).
Then, let’s suppose that all the factors reducing rainfall in the region, like the absence of evaporation from ground-trapped moisture — through plant life that is now gone — are defied by just our people.
Then, while we are into this journey of doing nothing and expecting it to change path, we can cast shade on all the countries of northern and southern Africa that have lost swathes of land permanently to desert and been unable to restore it. Because our new, encroaching and expanding desert is going to ‘turn green’, all on its beautiful own.
When we have finished this walk in the park, the reality will be the same.
Pastoralism is not working for our people, it is not feeding them, it won’t ever feed them unless climate change and desertification can be reversed, and that’s a task that extends beyond political slogans. It may be almost impossible.
For sure, try it. If you are a university student, please crack the formula: how will you reverse the desertification and breakdown of the water cycle in northern and eastern Kenya: write to me with the answer when you have found it, and I will shout it from the hilltops, and your name besides.
Or maybe we could stop the dreaming and notice we are losing ever more of our viable land and that’s just going to keep going and keep happening unless we change what we are doing.
Unless that livestock is let go, unless we use the sun of our north to power solar and derive all that is possible from the free power, from cultured cellular meats, to pumped and irrigated plants, the future is ever more humanitarian assistance, more violence, more deaths.
The water cycle is not set to be different for Kenya. We are making a desert.
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