The Next Eco-Warriors (34 page)

PHOTO BY DAVID WARTH

Hannah Fraser continues her work as a mermaid performer, using her unique link to the ocean to inspire and educate people on the importance of marine life. Meanwhile, the film
The Cove
has won an Oscar for Best Documentary and is raising awareness globally about the realities of Taiji. As for the dolphins, the battle continues. Activists held back the hunt in 2010, but despite great efforts, dolphins are still being slaughtered and need our help
.

Twenty-three
Kenya
Leader

PHOTO BY KEVIN OCHIENG

KENYA IS BURNING. PEOPLE HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE to grow their crops for the last two seasons, and the food stores are all dried up. They're hungry, and they're angry. They swept into Nairobi and Mombasa two weeks ago and began rioting. There are so many of them the government lost control. The police are powerless. In the countryside, the scorched earth can't even produce a single green shoot. And when the rains do come, they're so violent that the topsoil is washed away, and people cower in their houses in fear. I see Kenya, I see my country, ruined by climate change.

It was late November in 2009. I'm awoken suddenly by the cry of a young child. The clock beside the bed says it's 3 AM, and I sleepily look around the unfamiliar room. It takes me a few seconds to realize that I'm in Nairobi, far from home, and today is going to be one of the biggest days of my life. My host's four-year-old boy walks barefoot into the room and right up to my bed. He is staring at me and crying.

“I am scared, Kevin,” he cried. He was having a nightmare of a burning house, and his scream was what awoke me. But my mind was heavy with the big day to come. After months of planning, this was our moment. The media was now daring us, the politicians were guarded, and civil society was eager to witness what the young people of Kenya could accomplish in the battle against global warming. All systems were a go.

Five thousand young people from across the country were preparing to travel to Mount Kenya and stage a symbolic protest against climate change.
I was one of them, and I was helping lead the event. Yesterday, I had traveled to Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, from my home in the far coastal areas to help stage the event. For I knew that this protest had the potential to make history.

I did not have much time to prepare. I grabbed a cup of Kenyan tea and caught up with the news. The international media was filled with conflicts in Somalia and the economic crisis in the United States. The local media was occupied with the story of a draught-stricken village. Everywhere I looked, the world was on the brink. One of our greatest challenges had been to try to get our story out to the world, because most mainstream media in the country did not think our story was juicy enough to be worth telling. If it was not politics, or some disaster somewhere, it wasn't a story. But after months of pleas and negotiations, we had convinced a local broadcaster to send a camera team. Now we just had to give them something worth filming.

It was set to be an event of a lifetime. A flash mob of Kenyan youth would gather at the base of our biggest mountain, Mount Kenya. The mob would hold hands around the mountain as a protest against the melting ice on its top and the threat climate change has brought to our source of life. A small group, me included, would then scale the mountain and unfurl a banner on live television with a message to the world leaders set to meet at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. I had no small task. I was in charge of everything.

The stakes were high. Police violence was a definite possibility, and maybe once it was all done, no one would know because the media might
decide not to cover it. But if it worked, it might just be the final push needed to forge an international consensus on battling climate change.

The idea for the Mount Kenya action was born in early 2009. Sitting around the office, my classmates and I were reading the paper and drinking tea as usual when I came across an article that argued that the Copenhagen summit was a waste of time. This kind of talk makes me cross. It's not a question of whether anything is going to happen; it's a question of what will happen if we don't do something. I asked a friend whether he thought the meeting was going to bear any fruit. He told me he had no idea what the leaders were going to do in Copenhagen. It struck me that his reaction would have passed as normal if he was not a student of environmental science. But unfortunately, he was. If someone like him already felt defeated, then we had lots of work to do.

As for me, I had already been engaged in climate change advocacy for five years. At twenty-three, I was supposed to be making quick money and looking for a wife for the short life ahead. At least that's what my mother often told me. “Stop running up and down playing music to the deaf creatures embodied in politicians,” she would say. She thought that it was a waste of time trying to save a planet designed to perish. A desperate waste of time.

She would go on to tell me of how my peers were doing well professionally and settling down, some already upgrading to their fifth car. I never paid her much attention. But she did have a point. I was in a third world country after all, and everyone was running after the few resources remaining. And this hardly inspired much activism. To make it worse, there is a feeling among most that nothing we do here is going to make a difference on the world stage. Even if Kenya went 100 percent sustainable tomorrow, it wouldn't save us from global warming. We needed to get the big Western governments on
board, and that wasn't going to be easy—especially for a bunch of kids from Africa.

This is the thought that kept me moving the morning of the action. Despite my rude awakening, I was out of the house within minutes and on my way to Parliament Square where we were to all gather for our “Green Mile” departure. Green Mile was the name we gave to the environmentally friendly travel we were to stage to and from our destination. Two local companies had partnered with us to facilitate the Green Mile travel. One company was offering five buses. The other was offering fuel made from recycled vegetable oil that would otherwise have been drained into municipal drainage systems by five-star hotels.

It was a chilly morning. We left at 5 AM, armed with two writers for the local press. They were young enough to understand what we were fighting for. Our destination was Nyeri, a calm town at the foot of Mount Kenya, a four-hour bus ride from Nairobi. A couple of minutes before 9 AM, we joined a group of about five thousand young faces in Nyeri. It was a very emotional moment for me. Mobilizing five thousand young people may have seemed like a normal task in a developed country where young people have a clear view of the skyline in life. In a developing country like Kenya, most youth are disenfranchised with life and don't give a hoot about advocacy. They're too worried about getting one of the all-too-rare jobs available to young people and making sure they'll have enough money to start a family. Abstract issues like climate change seem like a problem for another day, once your basics have already been covered.

We had been working for months to break through this apathy. Here in Africa, it's all about creating networks. Community groups are strong, and if you can get a group on board, you will instantly have hundreds of members on board as well. It's far better than trying to convince people one by one. What's more, almost everyone belongs to a church or a football club, a mosque or a choir. So we reached out to all kinds of groups; we met with their leaders, and they spread our message about the urgency of fighting climate change in a way that was suitable to each group. We didn't have lots of money, but we did have numbers. And that is our strength. Across Africa,
we've seen time and time again that he who mobilizes the biggest number of people carries the day.

They don't have to be hardcore activists, just people who support you, regardless of whether they really understand why or not. Numbers get the media's attention. Numbers get the government's attention. We're not asking people to do much. Just come out and show support. It's a way of saying something without speaking, without having to know it all, without having to be a radical.

In Nyeri, we gathered at a stadium and had a session with the local leaders who were kind enough to give us the go-ahead for the flash mob. Even the member of Parliament for the region was present. This was highly unusual. More often than not, we felt like freedom of expression was just a piece of write-up in the Kenyan Constitution and not a reality for most Kenyans. Not with tear gas canisters and gunshots flying every time in any kind of protest.

I had seen it firsthand during Kenya's 2007 presidential elections when protests in the streets were violently repressed by police. I was an electoral officer, and accusations that the vote was rigged turned into mass marches in the streets. You could feel the tension. People were willing to sacrifice their lives for political gain. The government had a police force that was capable of deadly tactics. It was a vicious cycle, and one with an inevitable result: 1,200 people killed and some 350,000 displaced.

But we were hoping that we had taken all the right precautions to avoid any violence. We had met with the local authorities, and our location was perfect for the event. Mount Kenya is on national parkland and administered by the Kenya Wildlife Service, who were enthusiastic and supportive of us. So instead of having to face menacing police, we would be accompanied by friendly wildlife officers.