The soil is speaking but are we paying attention?

A woman holding soil. [Courtesy/GettyImages]

Many years ago, a small boy accompanied his mother to a women’s group meeting near Magomano factory in Gatundu South. The women were tending a tree nursery, preparing to plant grevillea along the boundaries of their farms.

During that meeting, another woman arrived and spoke with such clarity about our responsibility to heal the land that even the small boy on the periphery felt inspired.

That boy was me, and the woman with the car was Prof Wangari Maathai.

When Prof Maathai started the Green Belt Movement (GBM) in 1977, she wasn’t just talking about planting trees. She was connecting a denuded landscape to the daily struggles of rural women – firewood shortages, disappearing water, diminishing harvests. She and the women of GBM have since planted over 51 million trees, not as a “project” but as an act of dignity and agency.

Long before restoration became a buzzword, they understood that the health of our forests is the health of our communities.

We have seen proof of what is possible when we get restoration right. We have seen it in Rwanda, where the Forest of Hope Association has helped bring back the Gishwati Forest from near collapse into a recovering ecosystem where chimpanzees, birds and people once again thrive.

Closer home, a drive from Juja to Karatina gives a very striking reminder of what happens when communities commit to restoration. Twenty years ago, one could see the hills of Karatina from Kambiti; now the once-bare countryside is a mosaic of agroforestry. And today, the trees planted in the 1980s have become a cash crop for older people across Kiambu, Muranga and Nyeri. Restoration can sustain families long before anyone starts talking about carbon credits.

So why, with this knowledge in our hands, does the degradation continue? It may be because we have been asking the wrong questions. We ask, “How much does it cost to plant a million trees?” instead of “What is the cost of not restoring our watersheds?” We talk about carbon credits and biodiversity offsets, but we fail to talk about the soil itself – the living, breathing entity that underpins our very survival.

The answers are not in conference halls in distant cities. They are in the wisdom of the pastoralist who knows how to read the landscape, the farmer who understands the rhythms of the seasons, and the community groups who are already doing the work with little to no support.

One promising shift is underway. Through initiatives such as Restore Local – supported by the Bezos Earth Fund and the World Resources Institute – resources are beginning to flow directly to community groups already restoring Kenya’s (and Africa’s) landscapes. The idea is simple but long overdue; trust local champions with the long-term support they need, while strengthening the organisations behind them so their work endures.

This is the direction we must go. We must shift our starting premise. Local communities are not the beneficiaries of climate action; they are the leaders and experts. Our role is not to “build their capacity,” but to build our own capacity to listen. Restoration must be relational, not transactional, founded on respect, justice, and equity. It must be built from households to communities to landscapes, and only then to nations. Anything else lacks the legitimacy to be meaningful.

The soil is speaking. It is telling us a story of loss, but also one of immense possibility. It is time we stopped talking, and started listening.

—Mr Kahiro is the Chief Operating Officer at Maliasili Initiatives