The Milgis Trust

Category: Conservation Awareness, Errosion | Date: Feb 10 2009 | By: milgistrust

Just what are we going to do about it… It is very frightening…. Every time I fly up to the North over the plains west of the Matthews this is what I see. I keep taking more pictures as it just seems to look worse each time… But how can we stop it???… Tell people to stop breeding?? Tell them to cut down on there goats etc?? [ Its abit like asking us to cut our money we have in the bank by half!] , stop cutting the trees down to feed the stock, stop cutting the forests down for timber, research!, essential oils [Our scouts intervened a truck leaving the Kirisias just yesterday full of Sandal wood, hopefully the KWS are hot in pursuit]… Make dams, ie stem the rushing water flow?? … What else… At what stage do we [ humans] admit that there is a problem… I’m abit baffled.. You hardly ever hear our leaders, say any thing about the environment not being able to sustain the pressure we put on it… We just blame it on every thing else, the Climate change, No rain, too much rain, … never the fact that maybe we are too many…. No I don’t have children!!..

We can’t just close our eyes to it… Its dangerous, really dangerous…In so many ways…

Our head scout, Daniel Lentokunye ‘the elephant’, was on leave and was walking with some friends to Rumuruti in the Laikipia district, to return the skins used during his wedding to his second wife, to her mothers manyatta. He had to do this before he could proceed with any other ceremonies. He was going through an area called Ol Donyo Nyiru, where there is alot of the erosion like in the picture below and found a herd of Elephants in a terrible tiz, rushing around trumpeting. So he went to investigate and found a calf stuck in one of these erosion drains. They dug and dug with their spears, until they managed to get the calf out. They were fortunate enough, this time, to rescue the little one and see it reunited with its mother.

We hear of animals all the time falling into these gullies. Some body came to me when I took this picture and asked… WHAT CAN WE DO???