It was a sad event, the November 2010 eviction of the Samburu people (Kenya, East Africa) at the hands of environmental groups the Nature Conservancy and the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF).

At the time, the Samburu – cousins to the Maasai – were living on Eland Downs in Laikipia, a wonderfully verdant landscape near Mount Kenya and very close to the Ugandan border.

The Samburu are pastoralists; that is, they migrate from area to area to provide fresh grazing for their flocks, which include various indigenous species like East African (Zebu) cattle, East African goats, and Red Maasai sheep, a hairless breed well suited to rangeland.

The Laikipia Samburu had been at their location for about twenty years, an unusually long stretch for a pastoralist group, and one that testified to the excellent quality of life in the area. The area itself has been part of Samburu tradition for centuries.

The land, according to non-governmental advocacy group Survival International, was officially owned by former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, or “Nyayo”, who governed from 1978 until 2002, extending the policies of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta (who himself espoused cooperation as the only way to resolve Africa’s internecine conflicts).

The AWF, in what may have been a slip of the tongue, said the land was purchased from a private Kenyan landholder.

Once the “resettlements” began, and the Samburu appealed (successfully) to a Kenya court, the 17,100 acres were subsequently transferred to the the Kenyan Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife. The price was $2 million. That’s a far cry from 20 pieces of silver. Or is it?

In any case, not long after the land was sold, Kenyan police began rousting the Laikipia Samburu via the usual, time-honored methods passed down pretty much intact from the Mongol hordes (think Genghis Khan): burning houses – and occasionally the people in them – attacking and killing women and children who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, and slaughtering or stealing the Samburu’s livestock, which is their only real wealth in the world.  

The 2,000 Samburu family groups evicted now live in rude, hastily erected shelters on the edge of Eland Downs. Another 1,000 have been forcibly removed to far distant lands. Those who remain in the ad hoc village, especiallly women and children, often sleep out in the veldt when word of possible police raids reaches them.

The Nature Conservancy cites the purchase, and transfer, as a way of maintaining a wildlife corridor across the Laikipia Plateau. Another Nature Conservancy landing page, which included a statement on the events surrounding the land purchase and transfer, has been pulled, proving yet again that the only thing more offensive than a lie is stubborn silence.

The AWF has said it does not condone violence. Someone, however, has managed to insert a paragraph in the mainstream media suggesting that senior government officials during Moi’s time often engaged in “land grabbing”. Hmmm. Just during Moi’s time? 

The evicted Laikipai elders have said that leaving is not an option, even if more of their people are killed. This is ancestral land, and where – in the tumult that is East Africa, with Ethiopia and Somali regularly engaging in cross-border wars – would they go anyway?

When, I want to know, have we environmentalists become so overwhelmingly concerned about animal rights that we not only run roughshod over human rights, but actually exterminate the latter to provide an advantage to the former?

Environmental consciousness may be essential to the survival of Earth, but a sense of sustainability is the only ethic that rescues hope for that future from pointlessness. After all, what kind of future can we expect if the great panoply of human types is no longer present? And is it something we want at any cost?