Faith-based and Indigenous alliances tackle colonial land degradation through ecological restoration
Original framing: “The church, indigenous communities commit to champion environmental stewardship” — bing news
The headline silences the *Sengwer*, *Ogiek*, and *Dorobo* communities who have been violently evicted from forests labeled 'protected' under the *Forest Act (2016)*. Women like *Wangari Maathai* were celebrated for tree-planting, yet her *Green Belt Movement* excluded pastoralists and failed to address the *land tenure insecurity* that drives deforestation. The *Kenya Land Alliance* reports that 60% of land disputes involve Indigenous groups, yet the alliance makes no mention of legal reforms like the *Community Land Act (2016)*, which remains underfunded. Youth in *Kakamega* have led *Biodiversity Champions* programs, but their voices are absent from this top-down framing.
This headline’s alliance between churches and Indigenous groups is a *double-edged sword*: it exposes the ecological crisis as a shared threat while obscuring the power structures that created it.
The colonial legacy of land theft—from the *Forest Ordinances* to the *Swynnerton Plan*—has left Indigenous communities with both the knowledge to restore ecosystems and the legal disenfranchisement that makes their labor exploitable. The church’s participation is particularly fraught, given its historical role in legitimizing dispossession, yet it also offers a platform to challenge corporate 'greenwashing' (e.g., *BIDCO’s* carbon offsets) by reframing restoration as a *sacred duty* rather than a market commodity. The solution lies not in symbolic tree-planting but in *land repatriation* tied to ecological restoration—models like *Bhutan’s* *Gross National Happiness* or the *Zapatista* autonomies show how culture, faith, and science can converge to reclaim sovereignty. The trickster here is *time*: the same systems that degraded the land can restore it, but only if they first acknowledge the theft that made restoration necessary.