Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. It began with a buffalo. The animal lay slumped beside a dry waterhole in Kenya’s Tsavo West National Park, its great ribs rising and falling slowly in the dust. No rain had come. No relief was in sight. And no one else, it seemed, was coming. That moment, burned into Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua’s mind, marked the beginning of a mission that would define the rest of his life. Mwalua was not a scientist. He had no degree in ecology. He was a pea farmer with a secondhand water truck and a conviction that animals should not die of thirst while humans watched. In 2016, as drought scorched Kenya’s lowlands, he began hauling 3,000 gallons (about 11,400 liters) of water a

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