How an 'inside-out' conservation strategy is integrating traditional pastoralist practices with modern conservation tools to sustain biodiversity across working landscapes.

Jonah Western's world is at its most abundant when it dances what he calls "a lazy, ecological minuet".

Western is a Kenyan conservationist who has spent his life wrestling with the interplay between people and animals on the savannas that used to be under the sway of the Maasai, and who is attempting an ambitious retrofit of a dwindling landscape to meet expanding needs.

The minuet is a dance of decorum and harmony, and to illustrate how it's performed on the veld, Western reaches for a Maasai saying, that "elephants create grasslands and cattle create bushlands". And as each moves forward and back, they "create this tapestry of habitats which maintain diversity".

But he's quick to acknowledge that the dance floor is not as level or expansive as it should be. One of the main reasons is that what used to be communal land in the south of Kenya has been fragmented, privatised and degraded. The ways of the Maasai, pastoralists "who maintained the best grasslands in the world" with high animal populations, were disrupted by British colonial strictures, farming,...