This project was born out of an urgency — not only to document the climate crisis, but to interrogate the systems that claim to solve it. Breaking Point: A Green Paradox emerged during my time in Kenya’s Rift Valley, a place often framed as the cradle of humanity, but now reshaped by extractive policies veiled as environmental reform.

Through my photography, I sought to understand what sustainability means when its cost is invisibility. I was confronted by landscapes that had been cleared in the name of conservation, and by communities — like the Ogiek and Maasai — whose ancestral ties to the land were not only being severed but rewritten through a language of exile. Reforestation programs that prioritize exotic species, carbon credit schemes that erase Indigenous presence, and agricultural policies that replace cultural resilience with economic dependency — these are not aberrations. They are the new face of environmental governance in much of the Global South.

As a photographer, I do not claim to speak for those I meet. Instead, I listen, and I observe. The people I photographed are witnesses to a global paradox: that solutions to environmental degradation are often designed without — and against — those who have lived in balance with nature for generations.