Role of hunter gatherers in combating the effects of climate change around the Mau Forest complex of Rift Valley Province, Kenya

The hunter gatherers as the forest dwellers, through their Indigenous knowledge link to wild species have answers for addressing the causes and the impacts on Climate Change. Climate change is real. "Our forest has been destroyed. No Bee hives, hyrax, wild fruits and herbal medicine. We are being forced to adapt western culture and move out of our ancestral land…we will just die". Orop Kenyinget, March 2004, Nkaroni, Narok District Ogiek people are the main stake holders of the Indigenous knowledge of conservation of water catchments and forest, due to their unique culture. It is the basis for local-level decision-making in agriculture, health care, food preparation, education, natural resource management, and a host of other activities in rural communities.

In Mau Forest of Kenya, the Indigenous Knowledge about the environment is vast and complex, and is possessed by the people differently. The amount and type of this knowledge is influenced by the gender, age and socio-economic standing. The forest was managed by clans among the Ogiek community and or group. Due to various modern changes of policies and governance, the territory owned by clans was subdivided and allocated to individuals. This opened up the Mau forest for encroachment especially on the critical water catchments areas and shrines.

Among the Ogiek, Indigenous Knowledge was thus vital in smooth forest management, but the interference by the climate change, led to disappearance and forest destruction. The forest provided firewood, herbal medicine, and wild fruits besides acted as sacred sites for the Ogiek culture.

The merit of this Indigenous Knowledge, or local knowledge of the hunter gatherer, was developed outside the formal educational system. This traditional idea is embedded in Ogiek culture and is unique to a given location or society. It’s an important part of the lives of the poor communities. It is the basis for decision-making of communities in food security, human and animal health, education and natural resource management.

Many times researchers have tried to portray traditional way of conservation as totally different and opposed to the so called modern technology. Some aspects of traditional systems contain most of the elements that make a scientific proposition valid. At the same time, many scientific institutions use traditional cultural symbols and practices to generate an extra ounce of confidence or certainty. For instance, when an Ogiek farmer decides to harvest honey at a particular time, taking various factors such as meteorological conditions, temperature, etc., he is using his empirical knowledge which generates replicable, refutable, and verifiable results

Some best practices need to be approached and mechanisms put in place to ensure the role of Indigenous knowledge systems have been protected and transmitted to the next generations. In this case, state parties for instance should allow more education on the usefulness of the environmental conservation and the indigenous people should be involved both by the outside context like the UN agencies and the research international level in reaching to productive future mechanisms intended to combat the causes and consequences of climate change.

The causes of climate change need to be address by all developing countries in corporation with the consultation and participation of Indigenous people. The human unlimited activities like use of chemicals (e.g. pesticides) in plantations, charcoal burning, logging, lumbering, illegal settlement, mining, dumping of waste, massive use of fuel among others the greenhouse gases contribute directly to climate change.

From the field and observational survey, some of the realised impacts among the indigenous people includes; outbreak of diseases like cholera and malaria, drought among the pastoralists, extinction of wild fruits, rich honey and herbal medicines among the hunter gatherers, food crisis and insecurity due to competition of resources.

In brief, the witnessed realities are attached to this say that "Its untill the last river has been polluted, the last tree cut down and the last fish has been caught, that the human kind will realise that money cannot be eaten". anonymous

By Kiplangat Cheruyot
Ogiek tribe, Kenya
Human Rights Officer,
Ogiek Peoples Development Program (OPDP)
http://www.ogiek.org/