The Unique Natural Resources of Lake Naivasha; Can They Survive?

Lake Naivasha has been vital to humans for freshwater and grazing for millennia – it was an essential and reliable all-season water hole for pastoralist Maasai, whose oral history for at least the past 700 years coincides with the paleolimnological record of high water (prosperity) and low water (hardship). The lake has only been known to the Western world for fewer than 130 years, passed by several European explorers on their way seeking to quash “preposterous” rumours such as “snow on the equator” and to find the source of the Nile, who left maps and comments. It has only been seriously studied for under a century; the first scientists from Cambridge University inventoried its limnology during an extensive visit to East African lakes in 1930. Even by that time however, humans had left their “fingerprints” on the lake directly by introducing 2 fish species in the 1920s, most notably the American large-mouthed bass. Indirectly, they started affecting the lake 20 years earlier, when the “Lunatic Express” passed by the eastern side of the lake with a railway station, which initiated the settlement that now supports over half a million people. This chapter explains how the valuable natural and living resources of the lake came about, and discusses whether we humans value the resources adequately, our impacts upon them and their response, over the past 7 decades.