matter is that the question has many answers. The essential one was that I reacted to a set of problems by focusing on what could be done. As it turned out, the idea that sprang from my roots merged with other sources of knowledge and action to form a confluence that grew bigger than I would ever have imagined.
ln the early 1970s, in addition to my work at the University of Nairobi, I was involved with a number of civic organizations, including the Nairobi branch of the Kenya Red Cross of which I became director in 1973, and the Kenya Association of University Women. Many of these organizations had been founded by the British and staffed almost entirely by the wives of colonial officials. After independence,[168]Africans gradually replaced the white women. Educated Kenyan women, of whom there were still very few in the early 1970s, were often asked to volunteer their time in positions of leadership.
I was invited to join the local board of the Environment Liaison Centre. The Centre had been established in 1974 by a group of international environmental organizations to ensure the participation of civil society groups (also known as nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs) in the work of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), whose headquarters were established in Nairobi. UNEP, the first (and only) UN agency devoted to environmental issues and the only one headquartered in the developing world, was launched following the first United Nations global conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. The Stockholm conference helped raise awareness of the realities of environmental degradation in Africa and other regions, even though many developing countries' governments didn't agree with the solutions to the environmental crisis put forth by the industrialized nations, which they viewed as seeking to inhibit the development of poor countries.
Most of the originators of the Environment Liaison Centre (now called the Environment Liaison Centre International) were from Europe, North America, and Asia, and felt it was important for local people—Kenyans—to serve as "alternate," or local, board members. I was one of the few women members of the local board and became an alternate for Huey Johnson of the Resource Renewal Institute in California. Huey became a good friend and supporter and remains so to this day.
For me, a biologist who had grown up in a rural area where our daily lives depended 5 on the health of the environment, the issues raised at the Liaison Centre were not completely strange. For example, when we discussed biological diversity, my study of genetics was relevant. But a great deal of the information I was exposed to through meetings at UNEP, books and articles, and discussions with people working in environmental NGOs in different countries was new to me. Much of it dealt with natural sciences from a holistic perspective. Through the Liaison Centre, a whole different world opened up to me. In time, my colleagues elected me chair of the local board, a position I was to hold for more than ten years. I became so preoccupied with my voluntary work with the Liaison Centre that it almost became my second full-time career!
Another stream that contributed to my growing environmental awareness was academic. In the early 1970s, Kenya was the best producer of livestock products in East Africa. At the university I participated in research in veterinary medicine in an effort to keep domestic animals healthy and productive, not just in Kenya but throughout the region. Consequently, I undertook postdoctoral research on the life cycle of a parasite responsible for East Coast fever, a disease fatal to imported hybrid cattle that is spread through brown ear ticks. Local bovines are almost immune to the disease. I collected hundreds of the ticks from the cattle, incised them through the salivary glands (where the parasite lodged), cut them up for microscopic observation, and produced thousands of slides.
While I was in the rural areas outside Nairobi collecting the ticks, I noticed that the rivers would rush down the hillsides and along paths and roads when it rained, and that they were muddy with silt. This was very different from when I was growing up. "That is soil erosion," I remember thinking to myself. "We must do something about that." I also observed that the cows were so skinny that I could count their ribs. There was little grass or other fodder for them to eat where they grazed, and during the dry season much of the grass lacked nutrients.
The people, too, looked undernourished and poor and the vegetation in their fields was scanty. The soils in the fields weren't performing as they should because their nutrient value had been depleted. It became clear to me through these observations that Kenya's and the whole region's livestock industry was threatened more by environmental degradation than by either the ticks in the cows' ears or the parasites in the ticks' salivary glands.
When I went home to visit my family in Nyeri, I had another indication of the changes under way around us. I saw rivers silted with topsoil, much of which was coming from the forest where plantations of commercial trees had replaced indigenous forest. I noticed that much of the land that had been covered by trees, bushes, and grasses when I was growing up had been replaced by tea and coffee.
I also learned that someone had acquired the piece of land where the fig tree I was 10 in awe of as a child had stood. The new owner perceived the tree to be a nuisance because it took up too much space and he felled it to make room to grow tea. By then I understood the connection between the tree and water, so it did not surprise me that when the fig tree was cut down, the stream where I had played with the tadpoles dried up. My children would never be able to play with the frogs' eggs as I had or simply to enjoy the cool, clear water of that stream. I mourned the loss of that tree. I profoundly appreciated the wisdom of my people, and how generations of women had passed on to their daughters the cultural tradition of leaving the fig trees in place. I was expected to pass it on to my children, too.
Whatever the original inspiration for not cutting these trees, people in that region had been spared landslides, as the strong roots of the fig trees held the soil together in the steep mountains. They also had abundant, clean water. But by the early 1970s, landslides were becoming common and sources of clean water for drinking were becoming scarce. Ironically, the area where the fig tree of my childhood once stood always remained a patch of bare ground where nothing grew. It was as if the land rejected anything but the fig tree itself.
Another tributary of knowledge consisted of the women themselves, who brought the urgency of the situation home to me. By the early 1970s, I was a member of the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK). The NCWK was founded in 1964 as an umbrella organization to unify women's groups, both large and small, throughout Kenya, with membership drawn from urban and rural areas. The leadership consisted of women who were successful in their business, professional, or religious lives and they gave one another moral support in whatever sphere they were involved.
At a seminar organized by the NCWK, a woman researcher presented the results of a study she had done, which found that children in the central region of Kenya were suffering from diseases associated with malnutrition. This was an eye-opener for me, since that is where I come from and I knew from personal experience that the central region was one of the most fertile in Kenya. But times had changed. Many farmers had converted practically all of their land into growing coffee and tea to sell in the international market. These "cash crops" were occupying land previously used to produce food for people to eat.