When the Land Returns to Its Keepers

“The communities least responsible for destroying biodiversity are absorbing the most of its consequences. That is not coincidence. It is the continuation of the same colonial logic that caused it.”

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What We Are Losing

Scientists estimate we are losing plant and animal species at rates up to 1,000 times above the natural background rate. The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment found that approximately one million species face extinction within decades — a pace that qualifies this moment as the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. Unlike the five that came before, triggered by volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, or orbital shifts, this one has a single cause: the way industrial civilization has treated the living world as a resource to be extracted rather than a community to be sustained, pushing multiple interconnected environmental tipping points toward the edge at the same time.

Entire ecosystems are unraveling—reefs, forests, wetlands, grasslands, and river systems. And the services those ecosystems provide—clean air, fresh water, fertile soil, pollination, flood protection, and climate regulation—are unraveling with them. This is not a problem that exists at the edge of human life. It is the foundation of it.

Who Actually Caused This

The sixth mass extinction did not begin with individual consumer choices. It began with colonization—the systematic dispossession of Indigenous and African communities from lands they had stewarded for millennia, followed by the conversion of that land into extractive monocultures, mining operations, plantation agriculture, and resource export systems designed to enrich distant economies. Deforestation in the Congo Basin. Soil exhaustion across sub-Saharan Africa. Ocean depletion along coastlines that African fishing communities had managed sustainably for generations. These are not environmental issues that exist separately from the colonial project. They are the colonial project, continued by other means.

Naming this matters because the solutions most frequently proposed—individual sustainability choices, green consumption, and carbon offsets—cannot address a crisis rooted in structural extraction. We cannot recycle our way out of an extinction event caused by an economic system built on the premise that the earth’s living wealth belongs to whoever has the power to take it.

Who Is Bearing the Cost

In Uganda, communities along Lake Victoria are watching fish populations collapse under pressure from industrial trawling fleets—most of which operate from wealthier nations—that have depleted what local fishers managed sustainably for centuries. In Kenya’s Rift Valley and the surrounding highlands, changing rainfall patterns are disrupting agricultural calendars that have been stable across generations. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems has been transformed by decades of oil extraction into one of its most contaminated—a sacrifice zone for global energy consumption.

The communities living inside these crises are not passive victims of an impersonal natural disaster. They are the inheritors of land-management traditions that kept these ecosystems intact — and they have been systematically excluded from global conversations, research institutions, policy tables, and digital information systems that are now scrambling to address what was taken from them.

What Our Ancestors Knew

Before colonization imposed monoculture agriculture across the African continent, African farming communities practiced what we now call agroforestry—integrating trees, crops, and livestock in ways that maintained soil health, preserved water cycles, and supported biodiversity across generations. The Chagga people of Tanzania built food forests on the slopes of Kilimanjaro that remain productive centuries later. West African intercropping systems maintained soil fertility without chemical inputs. The Maasai’s pastoral land management preserved the grassland ecosystems of East Africa’s savannas. The Twa of Central Africa held detailed ecological knowledge of the Congo’s forest systems that no outside institution has fully mapped.

These were not primitive approximations of modern sustainability. They were sophisticated, intergenerational knowledge systems—accumulated over millennia, adapted to specific ecologies, tested over centuries—that the colonial agricultural model deliberately dismantled to impose extractive monocultures that served export economies. The extinction crisis is, in significant part, what happens after you destroy the knowledge systems that kept the living world intact. Today, that battle over agricultural sovereignty continues — Kenyan farmers are actively resisting the forced introduction of GMO crops as another form of agricultural imposition that threatens indigenous seed heritage.

The ancestors understood something the extractive economy still resists: you do not own the land. You belong to it. The health of the community and the health of the ecosystem are not separate questions. Ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — extends to the living world. We are because it is.

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What Ubuntu Village Is Doing

Ubuntu Village works on the ground in Kenya, Uganda, and soon Nigeria—communities that sit within some of the world’s most ecologically critical regions and have been systematically excluded from the digital information systems that shape decisions about their land, ecosystems, and futures. Our work centers on digital access: connecting community members to information, resources, and networks that have long been gatekept by geography, language, and wealth.

Because the communities that hold the deepest ecological knowledge should also have full access to the tools being used to document, research, and address the extinction crisis—not as research subjects, but as full participants. Communities that know their land and carry intergenerational ecological memory in their practices and relationships deserve to be at the table where decisions about that land are made. And reaching that table requires access to information and digital infrastructure that Ubuntu Village is working to provide.

The struggle to restore ancestral stewardship of the land does not exist in a vacuum. In Kenya, communities are also pushing back against biotech corporations introducing GMO seeds that threaten indigenous seed sovereignty and the ecological knowledge embedded in traditional farming — a resistance documented in our coverage of why Kenyans are protesting GMOs. The same logic that dispossessed communities of their land continues today through the commodification of seeds, soil, and the living knowledge that grows from both.

The sixth mass extinction will not be halted by recycling or individual consumer choices. It will be halted—if it is halted—by restoring decision-making power to the communities who have always known how to live within the living world and ensuring those communities have every resource they need to advocate for themselves on a global stage. See what this work looks like in practice: Return on Investment.

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What relationship does your community have with the land — and what ecological knowledge has been kept, lost, or is being reclaimed? We’d love to hear. Reach out.

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References

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  IPBES (2019). Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
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  WWF (2022). Living Planet Report 2022: Building a Nature-Positive Society. WWF International.
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  Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., & Dirzo, R. (2017). Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. PNAS, 114(30).
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  Leakey, R., & Lewin, R. (1995). The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind. Doubleday.
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  Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B., & Wangari, E. (Eds.) (1996). Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experience. Routledge.
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  Niang, I., et al. (2014). Africa. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Chapter 22.

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Related Reading

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  What Forest Networks Teach Us About Community
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  Every Cell Remembers: The Science of Cellular Memory and What Our Ancestors Already Knew
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  What Ubuntu Village Produces: Return on Investment

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