By Lucas Kasosi (Maasai, CS Intern)
“Our Elders hunted lions to protect our herds. Today, we are hunting for something else, plastic. It doesn’t roar, but it’s killing our way of life.”
— Ipato Kenta, Founder of Tembea Make An Impact
On the savannah plains of Kenya, where Maasai warriors once clashed with roaring predators to defend their cattle, a new beast now prowls the land. It doesn’t growl. It doesn’t bleed. But it is everywhere, tangled in the shrubs, choking rivers, buried in sacred soil, and killing the very animals the Maasai revere. It is plastic, the new lion.
For Ipato Kenta (Maasai), a young woman from Narok and the founder of Tembea Make An Impact, the fight against plastic pollution is no longer symbolic. It is personal. It is urgent. And it cuts to the core of identity, justice, and survival for her community.
As the world marked World Environment Day 2025, themed “Beat Plastic Pollution,” voices like Kenta’s must not be tokenized or sidelined; they must be centered. Because in her lived experience, as a woman, a pastoralist, and an Indigenous environmental leader, the answers the world has too long overlooked lie.
Plastic Pollution: A Threat to Life, Culture, and Land
In the Maasai territories of Narok and Kajiado, plastic isn’t just litter; it’s a slow, silent predator. It wraps around trees, clogs sacred rivers, and hides beneath dry soils where cattle once grazed freely. For the pastoralist communities that live in harmony with this land, plastic is not just polluting their environment; it is unraveling their way of life.
“Our cattle are our wealth, our food, our dowry, our pride,” says Kenta. “When they die from eating plastic, it’s like watching your savings burn. And what’s worse, many don’t even know plastic is the cause.”
Cows and goats, cornerstones of the Maasai economy and culture, are found dead with plastic bags knotted in their stomachs. Sometimes it's only discovered during a desperate autopsy: tangled bundles of discarded wrappers and packaging pulled from a stomach that once sustained a family.
“One time we opened a cow and found kilograms of plastic inside,” Kenta recalls. “We cried. That cow wasn’t just meat, it was school fees, milk for the children, and respect for the family. It was dignity.”
The crisis is compounded by invisibility. In many rural areas, the public has a limited understanding of plastic’s toxicity or permanence. The 2017 Kenyan ban on single-use plastic bags made international headlines as one of the toughest in the world. Yet enforcement in places like Talek, Mara, and Aitong’ remains sparse. Smuggled packaging, tourist waste, and black-market plastic still pour into these regions, unchecked and unchallenged.
Ipato Kenta at training symposium. Image Source Ipato Kenta.
“Plastic is illegal on paper,” Kenta says. “But in our rivers, in our markets, in our fields, it’s everywhere. Why? Because people don’t have alternatives. They don’t have information. They don’t have a choice.”
Globally, the scale is staggering. 91% of plastic is never recycled, and over 430 million tonnes are produced every year, most of it single-use. In Indigenous territories, many of which are biodiversity strongholds, this pollution compounds an already unequal burden. Communities that contribute least to the problem face its most dire consequences.
“We are not the manufacturers,” Kenta emphasizes. “We are not the ones with the factories. But we are the ones burying our animals and changing our way of life because of it.”
And while plastic poisons the land, it also corrodes the soul of the community. Traditional grazing patterns are disrupted. Ceremonial spaces are littered. Children grow up thinking plastic in rivers is normal.
“This is not just environmental degradation,” Kenta says. “It’s cultural erosion. It’s a spiritual crisis.”
Across the world, from the Amazon to the Arctic, this story repeats itself. Indigenous peoples protect over 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity, yet they are the most vulnerable to environmental degradation. Plastic pollution, while often framed as an urban or marine problem, is now a frontline issue in some of the most sacred and sustainably managed landscapes on Earth.
In Maasai country, where songs once rose over open plains and cattle grazed beside clean streams, plastic now sits like a scar across memory and a challenge to survival.
“The Land Is Sacred. We Used to Care for It Without Plastic. Let’s Go Back to That.”
In the Maasai worldview, the land is not a resource; it is a relative. It nourishes, teaches, and remembers. And in that relationship, care is not transactional; it is spiritual. For Kenta and her team at Tembea Make An Impact, reclaiming that sacred bond is the foundation of their work.
“Our elders conserved the environment better than us,” Kenta reflects. “They didn’t use plastic. They didn’t have bins. But they respected the land.”
That respect was embodied in every practice, from how food was stored in gourds to how animal waste was reused, from water conservation rituals to the seasonal movement of livestock that naturally regenerated grasslands. Today, those traditions are threatened, not just from plastic, but from forgetting.
Tembea Make An Impact recent clean up exercise.
To address this, Tembea centers storytelling as a tool for environmental education and cultural revival. Their school and community programs don’t begin with carbon footprints, they begin with oral history. They bring elders and youth together to talk about the land “before plastic,” to reflect on how communities once lived in balance without packaging, pollutants, or pollution.
“We blend Indigenous knowledge with modern science,” says Kenta. “Elders share how they protected water sources. Young people learn how to monitor them with data. But the goal is the same, respect, protection, continuity.”
One of Tembea’s most powerful initiatives, the New Lion Project, reframes the climate crisis through Maasai metaphor. In the past, lions were hunted to protect livestock and livelihood. Today, that predator has changed. It is no longer wild and furred, it is synthetic and invisible. It is plastic, and it is just as deadly.
“Our elders hunted lions. Today, we hunt pollution, our new lion,” Kenta says. “The danger has changed. But our courage hasn’t.”
The metaphor resonates deeply. It transforms climate activism from an external idea into an ancestral responsibility. It connects generations through a shared language of protection. And it affirms what many Indigenous movements know: that conservation is not new, it is inherited.
“This isn’t nostalgia,” Kenta adds. “It’s a roadmap. If we want to keep our culture, we have to fight for the land that holds it.”
Through school cleanups, intergenerational workshops, and youth summits, Tembea is nurturing a generation of environmental defenders who don’t see conservation as Western, but as Maasai, as rooted, as theirs. They are reclaiming the narrative, and in doing so, they are reshaping the future.
A Crisis Few Talk About And Fewer Still Understand
In many rural Indigenous communities across Kenya, plastic pollution is not just a crisis, it is a quiet catastrophe. And silence is its greatest weapon.
“People don’t know what single-use plastics are,” says Kenta. “They’ve never been told. So they throw them everywhere. They don’t know they’re killing their goats. They don’t know it’s degrading the soil.”
In the absence of awareness, plastic multiplies. It seeps into riverbeds, tangles in acacia thorns, burns in open heaps near homes, and disappears beneath the surface, until a cow dies, a stream smells of toxins, or a child coughs from the smoke of burning waste. And even then, the connection is often unclear.
Tembea Make An Impact engages school children in cleaning activities.
This is why Tembea’s work goes far beyond cleanup. It is not just about removing waste from the land, it is about removing ignorance from the conversation. It is education rooted in culture. Advocacy anchored in the community.
Tembea hosts school programs, market sensitizations, and community dialogues in which learning begins not with scientific jargon but with stories. The language is familiar, the lessons are ancient, and the delivery is human.
In these conversations, conservation is not outsourced, it is reclaimed. Children begin to teach their parents. Women begin to push back in marketplaces. Elders begin to share what was lost and what can still be recovered.
Because when people understand the problem, they can become part of the solution. And when that understanding is rooted in culture, memory, and story, it becomes unstoppable.
A Cultural Crisis Disguised as Trash
For the Maasai, land is not just territory, it is kin. It is sung about in folk songs. It is prayed over in ceremonies. It holds memory, identity, and law. To violate it with waste is not just an environmental offense; it is a spiritual desecration.
“Plastic is erasing our culture,” says Kenta. “Ceremonies once held on clean soil are now done near trash. Children grow up thinking it’s normal to see wrappers in the river. It’s not just pollution, it’s forgetting.”
In the sacred geography of Maasailand, where every tree has a story and every path has a purpose, plastic pollution lands like a betrayal. Water points used in blessings and rites of passage are now clogged with plastic bottles. Marketplaces once filled with woven baskets are now overrun with black-market packaging. Even the items used in traditional ceremonies, once made from natural materials, are increasingly replaced with synthetic, disposable substitutes.
Tembea Make An Impact school mentorship training.
“Plastic is not just killing animals,” Kenta explains. “It’s killing memories. We are forgetting how our people lived before it came. We used gourds. We used leaves. We used wisdom. Now, even in funerals and weddings, you find plastic everywhere.”
What’s being lost is not just aesthetic or symbolic, it’s ecological memory and intergenerational knowledge. It’s a way of life that maintained balance with nature for centuries, now overwritten by convenience and consumption imported from elsewhere.
Globally, Indigenous Peoples manage or have tenure rights over 38 million km² of land, territories that hold most of the Earth’s remaining biodiversity. Yet they are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation and receive less than 1% of global climate finance. In this vast imbalance, plastic becomes both a symptom and a symbol of wasteful systems imposed on communities that never needed them, and of solutions designed without those most affected.
As the UN Food and Agriculture Organization notes, Indigenous knowledge systems are critical to sustainable land management. But plastic pollution undermines those systems at their root, by displacing traditional practices, distorting norms, and disrespecting the land that sustains them.
And so, what the outside world might see as simple litter is, in fact, a wound. A disruption of the ecological and cultural continuum that has allowed the Maasai and many Indigenous nations to thrive for generations.
Tembea’s mission is not just to clean the land. It is to restore memory, ritual, and respect. Because without culture, conservation is hollow. Without clean land, the culture cannot breathe.
Tembea: A Youth and Women-Led Force
Born from loss and resilience, Kenta founded Tembea Make An Impact, Swahili for “walk with purpose,” in 2020. This youth- and women-led organization is emerging as a powerful force across southern Kenya, mobilizing communities to restore the land, reclaim memory, and seek justice.
Tembea’s approach goes beyond cleanup drives; it confronts plastic pollution as a symptom of deeper systemic challenges. Through school visits, community clean-ups, storytelling circles, and women-led workshops, Tembea weaves environmental action with cultural education. “We don’t just clean, we teach,” Kenta explains. “We ask: What did our elders use before plastic? What can we use now? To children, we say: This plastic is your lion. Hunt it with knowledge.”
School children collecting plastics in a cleaning exercise.
Operating in places like Mara, Talek, and Aitong’, regions where Maasai culture meets acute climate vulnerability, Tembea connects past and present. It revives traditional wisdom as a vital tool to combat a modern threat.
Tembea’s work is concrete and grounded. From organizing plastic-free market days to running school campaigns that blend the science of waste management with Maasai proverbs and oral histories, the organization creates a meaningful bridge between environmental science and Indigenous knowledge.
“We don’t start with climate jargon,” Kenta says. “We start with the elders' wisdom. The lion used to be our enemy; today, plastic is the new lion. Let’s hunt it with knowledge.”
This powerful framing transcends generations, transforming environmentalism from an abstract, foreign concept into an intimate, intergenerational responsibility.
Women at the Frontlines And the Forefront
At the heart of Tembea’s impact are its women, over 500 women and girls trained in zero-waste entrepreneurship, climate advocacy, and Indigenous conservation practices. Their solutions, from weaving baskets that replace plastic bags to reviving gourd-based water storage, are deeply rooted in heritage and practicality.
“Women are the first to suffer,” Kenta says. “We fetch water. We sell in the markets. We care for sick animals. But we’re also the first to act.”
In communities where patriarchal norms often silence women’s leadership, Tembea creates spaces for solidarity, confidence, and voice through storytelling, skill-sharing, and support circles. As one elder told Kenta, “You’re not just cleaning the land, you’re restoring the dignity of the daughters.”
A cleaning exercise by Tembea Make An Impact.
Environmental crises like plastic pollution disproportionately impact women. “We collect water, cook, and sell at the markets; we are the ones who see the problem every day,” Kenta explains. “That’s why we lead.”
By training women in zero-waste entrepreneurship, reviving Indigenous alternatives to plastics, and empowering them in advocacy, Tembea has transformed over 500 women into active agents of environmental restoration.
“When women understand they have the right to speak and the tools to act, everything changes. They stop being victims. They become protectors.”
A Ban Without a Backup Plan
Kenya’s 2017 historic ban on single-use plastic bags earned global praise as one of the world’s toughest anti-plastic laws. But in the remote corners of Narok and Kajiado, its impact is barely felt. Enforcement is inconsistent, affordable alternatives are scarce, and recycling infrastructure is virtually non-existent.
“You can’t fine someone for using plastic if you haven’t given them anything else,” Kenta observes. “You can’t fly drones to track waste while people are burning plastic for warmth. That’s not justice.”
Her frustration reflects a broader reality highlighted by the UN’s Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity: top-down bans without meaningful community engagement often fail. What’s needed are context-sensitive enforcement, locally tailored solutions, and direct investment in grassroots efforts.
School children in a climate and environmental training.
In rural communities, the ban exists mostly on paper. “The behavior hasn’t changed,” Kenta explains. “What’s a market woman supposed to use if she can’t afford a reusable bag? What does a child carry lunch in when there’s no alternative?”
Without recycling centers, education programs, or affordable options, many rural residents are stuck in a cycle of using, burning, or burying plastic waste. “Behavior change starts with infrastructure,” Kenta stresses. “If we had bins, recycling hubs, and storytelling that resonates, people would change.”
This gap between policy and practice mirrors global patterns. According to the 2022 UN FAO report on Forests and Biodiversity, many plastic bans fail because they overlook the socio-cultural and economic realities of Indigenous and rural communities. Enforcement often happens without education, regulation without replacement.
Kenta offers a grounded solution: “We need bins. We need training. We need biodegradable alternatives people can actually afford. And above all, we need a policy to walk, not just talk.”
In communities where livelihoods depend on packaging, especially women traders, bans without practical support risk punishing those they aim to protect. “You can’t ask people to stop using plastic if you don’t give them an option,” Kenta emphasizes. “Policy should come with a basket, not a fine.”
As the UN report confirms, “Policy mechanisms often ignore local contexts, making implementation ineffective.” For Kenya’s ban to succeed, it must enter villages, listen under the shade of a tree, and respond to real needs.
From Grassroots to Global Stages
Tembea’s work transcends local boundaries. The organization campaigns nationally and internationally to amplify Indigenous representation in climate and conservation arenas. Kenta has addressed youth climate summits, biodiversity conventions, and COP gatherings, but often finds these spaces unwilling to truly listen.
“We are asked to come and speak, but not to decide. We share our pain, and they clap. Then nothing changes,” she says. “We don’t need applause. We need equity.”
Kenta calls for more than symbolic inclusion. She demands real decision-making power, direct funding to grassroots Indigenous organizations, and policy developed with not-for-profit communities.
“Don’t fly over us with drones and then speak for us in Geneva. Come to the village. Sit under a tree. Ask. Listen. Then act,” she challenges.
Ipato Kenta during a past workshop.
True equity means Indigenous leaders must not only tell their stories but also shape strategies. It requires respecting Indigenous ecological knowledge and acknowledging that sustainability existed long before it became a global buzzword.
Tembea is not just cleaning up, it’s campaigning fiercely. By bringing Indigenous youth voices to international platforms, the organization exposes the tokenism embedded in many such spaces.
“We are invited to speak, not to decide. They want our stories, not our strategies,” Kenta asserts. “That must change.”
She urges global policymakers to decentralize climate finance, fund Indigenous-led organizations directly, and uphold Indigenous sovereignty, not just symbolically, but structurally.
“We are not asking to be saved. We’re asking to be trusted.”
A Plastic-Free Future
When asked what a future without plastic looks like, Kenta doesn’t hesitate.
“It looks like children playing barefoot without stepping on bottles. Goats chewing cud, not wrappers. Markets filled with baskets, not bags. Women weaving, not weeping. Singing, not coughing from smoke.”
Her vision isn’t utopian, it’s practical, rooted in what once was and what can be again. A world where development doesn’t mean destruction. A world where innovation walks hand in hand with tradition.
“We don’t want to go back. We want to move forward, but with our values. With our dignity. With clean land and respected culture.”
For Kenta, a plastic-free future is a regenerative future, where Maasai knowledge systems are honored, not overwritten. It’s a future where plastic no longer looms as the lion, but lies defeated like a carcass in the grass.
Tembea Team in their cleaning efforts.
She smiles as she imagines this future: “It looks like clean rivers. Cattle grazing safely. Elders teaching children under trees, not trash. A return,not backwards, but inward, a return to respect.”
This is no mere nostalgia. It’s a powerful vision of regeneration. Plastic-free doesn’t mean progress-free. It means development that honors culture rather than destroys it.
“Our elders lived sustainably without words like ‘carbon’ or ‘climate.’ They lived in balance. That’s not ancient, it’s brilliant.”
What Policymakers Must Hear
So, what should global decision-makers do on World Environment Day?
“Don’t just sit in boardrooms. Come to the grassroots. Listen. Partner. Fund local solutions. And most of all, let Indigenous people lead,” Ipato urges.
Her message is echoed by Cultural Survival and Indigenous environmental leaders worldwide: true sustainability is impossible without Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and wisdom at the core of climate action.
On World Environment Day 2025, themed “Beat Plastic Pollution,” Ipato’s words cut through the noise:
“Plastic is not just trash. It’s a symbol. Of who gets to pollute. Who gets to profit. And who gets poisoned.”
She calls on international donors, governments, and institutions to commit to four urgent actions:
- Fund Indigenous-led initiatives like Tembea.
- Invest in rural infrastructure, bins, affordable alternatives, and education.
- Include grassroots voices in policy design from the start.
- Trust Indigenous knowledge not as relics of the past, but as vital roadmaps for the future.
“We are not waiting to be saved. We are saving ourselves. But imagine what more we could do if the world stood with us.”
Ipato’s call is clear: plastic pollution is not merely an environmental issue, it’s a matter of justice. “It’s about who gets to pollute, who gets blamed, and who gets left behind. If we don’t center Indigenous voices, we’re not solving the problem, we’re sidelining it.”
She challenges governments, donors, conservationists, and civil society to act, not with pity, but with genuine partnership.
“Come to the grassroots. Fund what already works. Let Indigenous people lead, not because we’re victims, but because we’ve always known how to live in balance.”
Final Word: The Lion Has Changed, So Must We
The lion stalking Maasai lands today isn’t wild, it’s manufactured. It’s dumped. It’s ignored. But in the hands of women like Ipato Kenta, it’s being named, challenged, and slowly, steadily, defeated.
Ipato Kenta addressing a workshop on climate change and sustainability.
“This fight is not just about waste,” she says. “It’s about memory. About the future. About justice. And about dignity.”
This World Environment Day, as the world chants “Beat Plastic Pollution,” let us remember that real change comes from those already walking the land.
If the Maasai have taught the world anything, it’s that the fiercest warriors defend not just territory, but identity, dignity, and life.
Her message to young Indigenous women is deeply personal:
“Don’t wait to be invited. Don’t wait to be told you belong. Start wherever you are at school, at home, in the market. You don’t need a title to speak for your people. Your voice matters. This space is yours, too.”
And as Ipato reminds us:
“We are no longer waiting to be saved. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
“The fight is not over,” she says. “If you are a young Indigenous girl, don’t wait. Start wherever you are. Your voice matters. Your community needs you. Together, we will live on a planet that is not just plastic-free, but full of pride, culture, and life.”
This World Environment Day, let’s stop managing the crisis from afar. Let’s beat plastic pollution by elevating the voices of those already doing the work, and bearing the burden.
Let’s start with people like Ipato. Because the lion we now face doesn’t roar, it chokes, clogs, and contaminates.
And it’s time we fought back.
