Built through the collaborative authorship of local researchers and citizen scientists, this book centers lived experience as essential knowledge for imagining solutions to displacement and ecological degradation in Kenya’s Embobut Forest.

The Embobut Forest in western Kenya is beset by a series of pernicious challenges. Degraded forest ecosystems, biodiversity loss, violent evictions, population growth, and the adverse impacts of climate change all underwrite a persistent sense of regional crisis and failed prosperity. Conservationists blame local populations for forest destruction, while community activists emphasize experiences of livelihood loss and marginalization produced through the imposition of unjust conservation boundaries. Proposed solutions are equally contested. Calls to restore the forest to an imagined natural state devoid of human presence sit in tension with activist efforts to revive idealized Indigenous ways of life grounded in environmental stewardship.

The Glades of Embobut challenges these narratives by situating Embobut as a landscape in constant transformation, shaped through ongoing efforts by communities and policy makers to rework ecological, economic, and political relationships in pursuit of regional prosperity. It demonstrates how existing forms of socioecological wellbeing emerge primarily from local knowledge and everyday practice rather than externally conceived development models, and how these processes unfold without fixed end points. Any imagining of forest futures must therefore accommodate the open-ended nature of daily life, where new social and ecological relationships emerge in ways that diverge from the idealized forest environments envisioned by both conservationist and activist thinking.