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impacts.” Mesquite had created “sprawling impenetrable thickets.” Far from halting desertification, it
was creating “new green deserts” by lowering the water table and killing native trees. Far from feed-
ing animals, it had “replaced grasses and reduced livestock carrying-capacity on traditional pastures.”
In places, it had forced communities to abandon their land. Governments were launching eradication
programs. In this long diatribe, Witt omitted to mention the role of UNEP in what it now regards as a
dreadful mistake.
38
Some pastoralist communities were in trouble. In 2006, people who lived along the shores of Lake
Baringo in northern Kenya claimed that the plant had spread rapidly, consuming their water supplies,
ripping their flesh with its thorns, and killing their goats. They sued the Kenyan government, which
had planted the mesquite at the behest of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. At one point the
community paraded a toothless goat through the courtroom, to show how sugary fibers of the plant's
seedpods caused gum disease.
39
Clearly this was not good. But the truth is more nuanced. In a study around Lake Baringo, Esther
Mwangi of Harvard and Brent Swallow, now at the University of Alberta, found that the invader had
created winners as well as losers. The winners were typically those who harvested and sold wood for
construction and mesquite seedpods for feeding penned livestock and those who made rope from bark.
The pods had even become an export crop. Others sold honey made by bees attracted to the bush. Most
losers were pastoralists who had lost grazing land.
40
A British government study dismissed the new fad
of trying to eradicate mesquite as bone-headed. “Eradication was not only impossible but also unneces-
sary,” it said.
41
It is a shame that UN agencies, conservationists, and others cannot promote such balanced thinking
rather than engaging in blind rhetoric that only begs the question of when they might change their minds
again.
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