A future for movement?

While SORALO’s monitoring suggests its efforts are yielding results, South Rift communities face an extraordinarily complex future. Human populations are projected to continue increasing across East Africa’s rangelands, even as traditional practices erode and fences proliferate. Of SORALO’s 16 member ranches, nine have subdivided, meaning community members voted to divide communal lands into individual parcels. The appeal of subdivision is that it gives families secure tenure to their own piece of land; the paradox is that no pastoral family can sustain itself on a single parcel of land.

Changes to Kenya’s rangelands add up to changes in peoples’ relationships with wildlife. As herders move more livestock through smaller, more degraded areas, more conflict with wildlife is inevitable.

“I see major problems in the future,” says Noolteyan Ntiyiongo, a pastoralist woman from the Shompole Group Ranch. “There’s not enough space.”

On a deeper level, some observers argue that SORALO’s pastoralist-led model is fundamentally flawed, destined to be overwhelmed by the changes coming to Kenya.

“To romanticize pastoralism is a fallacy. Pastoralism is driving much of our decline in wildlife,” says Dino Martins, executive director of the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya. Martins says that exponential increases in livestock populations across Kenya are currently driving a range of ecological issues. He points out that multiple studies have shown that Kenya’s rangelands are already badly overgrazed and current conservation efforts are failing to slow losses to wildlife and plant diversity.

“Kenya is home to nearly 700 different grass species, yet in most of the rangelands our grass species are disappearing and being replaced by invasive and weedy plants that are able to withstand high levels of grazing pressure,” says Martins. “Grasslands and grazing animals co-exist in a delicate, co-evolved relationship that is currently collapsing as livestock numbers increase beyond the carrying capacity of the land.”

As for the authors of the 2016 paper charting Kenya’s wildlife declines, they note that the country is switching from an “empty world” with enough space for wildlife and people to a “full world” of increasing conflict. The authors see pastoralists-led conservation efforts like SORALO’s as a necessary, but insufficient, response to Kenya’s conservation challenge. Ultimately, they say, stronger government policies are needed to support local management of wildlife.

For their part, SORALO staff say they are advocating for and helping herders navigate new government policies that support coexistence. SORALO staff also acknowledge that their strategy involves trade-offs between the needs of wildlife and the needs of people.

“Obviously if you are trying only to maximize wildlife, this is not the right approach,” says Guy Western.

One morning I join Western and Steiner Sempeta, SORALO’s data manager, for a trip to the Loita Hills. Just west of Olkirimatian and Shompole, the Loitas are known as a stronghold of traditional Maasai culture, and for the old-growth Loita Forest, which remains intact largely because of cultural rules.

As we travel across the plains leading to the Loita Hills, Sempeta and Western narrate the landscape. To the right is the past of Kenya’s rangelands, an open expanse of whistling thorn and grass stretching away to the horizon. To the left is one possible future: a sub-divided, fenced-in landscape. Sempeta and Western note that the fence posts are cedar — trees taken from the Loita Forest — and that a major wildebeest migration through the area has recently all but stopped.

We camp in the shadow of the Loitas, in the company of a number of SORALO community game scouts and Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) rangers. Over dinner, a young KWS ranger shares tales of life in Kenya’s wilds. His favorite post was Tsavo East National Park, because it was simple; there, poaching was his only problem. Now that he works in community lands, he has to attend to the thornier issue of human-wildlife conflict. A 14-year-old girl was just killed by an elephant, he says; not long ago, it was a 42-year-old man.

Coexistence doesn’t come easy. SORALO’s work in the South Rift is messier than conservation in protected areas, where human activity is largely excluded. But in Kenya, as in other parts of the world, it will be the shared spaces beyond parks that determine the future of wildlife, and of people’s relationship to wildlife.

Earlier in the evening at our camp with the KWS rangers, the familiar sounds of whistles and bells — herders driving their animals home — came floating down Loita Hills. Now, as the Milky Way arcs across the sky, hyenas take over. They’re somewhere not far off, whooping in the dark.

Banner image: Loserem Pukare, who works for SORALO’s Rebuilding the Pride lion conservation program, looks for lions on the Shompole Group Ranch in southeastern Kenya. Image by Guy Western.

Editor’s note 3/1/19: At Dino Martins’s request, this story was updated after publication to clarify the explanation of his views.

Citations

Ogutu, J. et al. (2016). Extreme Wildlife Declines and Concurrent Increase in Livestock Numbers in Kenya: What are the Causes? PLoS ONE 11(9): e0163249.

Russell, S., et al. (2018). Seasonal interactions of pastoralists and wildlife in relation to pasture in an African savanna ecosystem . Journal of Arid Environments 154:70-81.

Western, D., et al. (2009). The Status of Wildlife in Protected Areas Compared to Non-Protected Areas of Kenya . PLoS ONE 4(7): e6140.

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