Lake Turkana in northern Kenya is often portrayed as a region in perpetual crisis due to climate change. But for the Indigenous groups who have lived here for centuries, environmental change is not new. Local livelihoods have long shifted between pastoralism, fishing, farming and trade as people adapt to a landscape defined by fluctuation. What has changed is the scale and intensity of pressures now converging on and around the lake — from increasingly erratic climate patterns and mounting strain on fisheries, to oil development, resource conflict, and the political decisions now shaping the lake’s future. In 2008, Ikal Angelei was working as a program coordinator at the Turkana Basin Institute, a pioneering research center focused on human origins and the environment, when she first heard from visiting scientists about a huge hydroelectric dam being built across the border in Ethiopia. Concerned about the Gibe III Dam’s potentially devastating impact downstream, on Lake Turkana and the communities that depend on it, Angelei founded a grassroots organization called Friends of Lake Turkana to amplify the voices of people who had been excluded from the consultation process and fight the project. In 2012, Angelei was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her advocacy. Her organization continues to work with and on behalf of communities within the greater Turkana Basin to demand collective social, economic, cultural, environmental and territorial justice. Mongabay spoke with Angelei about resilience, reductive narratives, and what Turkana’s history might reveal about its future. This interview has been lightly edited…This article was originally published on Mongabay