"We are a harbinger of what is to come"

Stephen Leahy in IPS: A small group of indigenous people have travelled here to the historic Copenhagen climate talks to show negotiators dramatic documentary videos they made about the immediate impacts of climate change on their homelands and way of life. "We want to show policymakers what the three-year long drought in my country is doing to our communities," said Stanley Selian Konini, a Maasai from Oltepesi in Kajiado district, Kenya.

"Our animals are all dead. The zebras and the monkeys are dying even in the forests," Konini told IPS. "Leaders need to change policies to help us." The Kenyan video documents the impact of an intense drought hitting the Maasai community. During these extremely hard times, pastoralists have been losing their cattle - their main and sometimes only livelihood.

"It's affecting our culture. There can be no dowry payments because we have no animals," said Konini, one of the young Maasai who made the video. "The elders say they have never seen anything like this drought. It is something beyond their understanding and experience of the Maasai people," he said.

Konini's video is part of a series called "Conversations with the Earth" which features videos created by indigenous communities from four different continents, offering powerful evidence and testimonials of climate change problems in their far-flung home communities.

The series is a year-long collaboration between Land Is Life of Boston, an indigenous rights advocacy group, and Britain-based community video trainers InsightShare, in collaboration with photographer Nicolas Villaume, which provided video equipment and training…..

A Maasai village, shot by Nicor, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License