Rusinga Island, Kenya, PDC With Lesley Byrne (December 2012)
Aid Projects, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops, Education Centres — by Elin Lindhagen October 17, 2012
What: Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course with Lesley Byrne
Where: Rusinga Island, Kenya
When: December 4 — 17, 2012
Rusinga Island is one of the bigger islands in the Kenyan side of Lake Victoria. It’s the home of ancient fossils from before Homo Erectus and was once a green and luscious island, home of unique bird species and tall indigenous trees. The Rusinga Island of today is ravaged by deforestation as an exploding population tries to carve out a livelihood on the islands already scarce resources. In the last few years, the local community has for the first time experienced the total loss of harvest during the droughts caused by increasingly unreliable weather patterns.
Regenerating Rusinga (Kenya)
Aid Projects, Biodiversity, Community Projects, Deforestation, Developments, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Land, Population, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Trees, Village Development, Water Contaminaton & Loss — by Elin Lindhagen February 28, 2012
FMNR workshop, Feb 2012, Kenya
Rusinga Island is situated in Lake Victoria in the Western parts of Kenya. It is known for its prehistoric findings of primate fossils dating from 17 million years ago and for being the birthplace of the famously assassinated Kenyan politician, Tom Mboya, whose scholarship fund enabled Barack Obama’s father to study abroad. Not too many years ago it was still known to be a beautiful forested island, rich in unique bird species and with access to great fishing. Today the island is considered a vulnerable ecosystem with marginal agricultural land, leading one author to call it ‘one of the driest and most environmentally marginal agricultural zones in the region’(1).
Rapid population growth in the 1980s led to intensified pressure on natural resources such as trees and fish. At the same time, other communities started coming into Rusinga’s fishing waters to exploit the fish resources. Fish stocks started declining and the fishermen of Rusinga were forced to start looking for other ways of making an income. Many turned to agriculture but the Luo’s on Rusinga were traditionally fishermen, not farmers. Trees were cut down to make houses for a growing population, firewood to feed an increasing number of hungry stomachs and charcoal to make an income. Within a generation, what was once a richly forested island had become bare — suffering increasing droughts, soil erosion and crop failures due to the loss of trees.
Comments (1)
