A Paradise Lost
On watching climate change erase a cherished landscape, and finding beauty in what remains
Something I’m Learning
Think of a place of great natural beauty that’s emotionally important to you.
Now think of it gone forever.
Destruction is as ‘natural’ as creation. Climate change accelerates this, but t’was ever thus.
There’s a spot in Kenya that means the world to me: a stunning grove of acacia trees on the shores of Lake Naivasha. The land-water boundary attracts astonishing birdlife – sit for 15 minutes and you’ll see fish eagles, superb starlings, Egyptian geese, cormorants, great white pelicans, lilac-breasted rollers, hamerkops, greater egrets, sacred and hadada ibises, yellow-billed storks, pied kingfishers, and more. Butterflies will flutter around you. Gorgeous colobus monkeys might swing through the trees above. In the lake, hippos grunt and thrash. When Martha Gellhorn wrote that Kenya is the paradise section of Africa, this may be it. Like those photos that don’t do justice to what your eyes are seeing, there’s an indescribable Edenic loveliness to the sunrise hitting the yellow acacia trees while the calls of the fish eagles mingle with the cries of the starlings and the grunting of the hippos.
A few months ago, I was at Lake Naivasha for a work event at a high-end resort when I felt the urge to visit my special spot. Living in the US, these opportunities don’t come often so, despite the logistics and expense to make it happen during a busy week, I went. As John Le Carre writes (one of my favorite lines):
sometimes we have to do a thing to understand why we did it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.
I arrived late at night so my first sighting would be at sunrise, which is enchanting there. Unlike the conventional resort I stayed at that week, this place is rustic, even wild. The floors of even the most expensive cottages are crooked and sometimes broken. The furniture dates to colonial times. There’s no light but moonlight walking to your cottage from the restaurant. And there’s no Wi-Fi in the rooms.
I woke before dawn, and unable to check my phone, lay listening to the world waking up. Mysterious creatures (probably monkeys) thumped across my roof as always. Excited by these sounds from fond memories, I got dressed and stepped out of my room, eager to be in nature as the sun rose and the trees sparkled.
My heart sank. It was gone.
The birds were still there - the eagles still fishing, the ibises still cawing - and I could hear the hippos. But the trees, those magical soaring yellow acacias, were gone. And the lake had encroached on the grove – as several Rift Valley lakes have done of late – so it’s now much smaller.
This place I love is a shadow of itself.
The staff later told me that heavy rains in 2020 flooded the grove and killed all the trees. They replanted them, but then it flooded again last year and killed the saplings. They don’t know whether to bother planting again.
The grove is not coming back in my lifetime. I’m glad I took my mom there. I never got to take my wife though.
It’s not just the physical beauty; it’s also the memories. I was lucky to spend a lot of time in my 30s working there. It was the home and inspiration for a course called ‘Bio-Empathy’ that I co-created with a friend, which remains one of my favorite things I’ve done. Several participants called that little course life-changing. One told me she was contemplating suicide before she did it. Another said the three days there were worth the cost of the whole 5-month program of which it was a small part. Another demanded to know why it wasn’t in every environmental studies master’s degree in the world. Standing around, looking at the denuded grove, all these comments from years of students came back to me. It was the best ‘classroom’ I’ve ever taught in.
There are moments of personal significance too. Time sitting on an upturned boat writing a commencement speech for students at an American university 11 timezones away. Time with my co-founder that strengthened our relationship. Even time doing mushrooms for the first time with a friend – we drove all the way from Nairobi because this was hallowed ground to us.
I know this all sounds mawkishly nostalgic. Yet it feels important to eulogize a beauty that once was.
And maybe still is. When I speak the reflections that would become this essay into an AI-enabled voice recorder, it translates the background birdsong as “upbeat music.” At sunrise the birds sound like a music festival with four or five stages playing at once. It’s an ambience that artificial intelligence can’t capture. And as I stand there surveying the decay and feeling as glum as this essay sounds, I see a woman come out of a nearby cottage. She's wearing sweats and big fluffy slippers, drinking her morning coffee as she walks to the lake. Something about her gait makes me realize she's marveling at the beauty. Trying to view it through the eyes of someone new, I see it's still a lovely spot, even though only wisps remain of what its former glory.
This makes me recall other places I’ve found beautiful and wonder if those who were there decades before me would scoff at how they’re faded today. Perhaps it’s just the circle of life, and this lakefront will eventually recover its grandeur. I won’t see it, but I wish we slow down climate change enough that someone in a couple of generations will.
Something to Consider
We repeatedly save the world. But it doesn’t stay saved. From the Hope is a Verb podcast with historian and novelist Ada Palmer: A History of Saving the World.
Something to Quote
“This is a story, too, of the redemptive power of landscape. The deep joy with which Denys responded to nature took him close to the mystery of it, and gave him an awareness of the human need to reach out to the transcendental.”
- Sara Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton
What is the moral of this Roshan... keep moving forward and don't look back too far into the past.. this reminds of some of the memories of distant past which has changed beyond recognition due to climate change or " development"
thanks for the reflection. I sympathize. We lose a lot in life, although we gain more.
I think a lot about a quote from an American environmental writer who bemoaned the loss of childhood experience, when two boys could float down a river in a canoe for days without any encumbrance or trouble. He was writing about Wisconsin - or maybe the Mississippi river. But that experience is indeed lost forever and seems very alien already.