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Okech 'Kenuel' Ogwaro: Master of Managing Insect Pests
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19582 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
3,587 Words |
| Author
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January Anderson
January Anderson is a free-lance writer living in Glendale,
California, who recently interviewed Ogwaro. |
Ugandan-born entomologist Okech "Kenuel" Ogwaro's given name, Okech, means "the famine boy." His surname, Ogwaro, loosely translates as "the control of postharvest insect pests by burying or burning stalks."
Both names hint at experiences that help explain this entomologist-turned-businessman's very different approach to managing insect pest populations in ultraurbanized Southern California.
As a boy growing up in tropical Africa, Ogwaro dealt with insects daily, both as food in times of famine and on farms in times of growth. He controlled the insects the same way his people had done for generations: by outsmarting them. Now the owner of small pest control service called Eco-Care, based in San Diego, California, Ogwaro applies the same principles to controlling insect pests in modern households, landscaping, and businesses--virutally without the use of pesticides.
Low-key and anything but an alarmist, Ogwaro, however, does not like to identify himself with the environmental movement. Environmentalists, he diplomatically explains, "seem to talk about a broad spectrum of problems, and I want to stay within my narrow field of entomology." He is also leery of the term "environmental activist," and has no wish to bring such a label upon himself.
Nonetheless--and in a rather unexpected turn in his entomological career--he has become dedicated to diverting the course of mainstream thought about insect control away from pesticides and toward chemical-free techniques, including an increased tolerance of insects.
Living within the food chain
Born in 1943, Ogwaro came into the world in the postharvest month of February--except there had been no harvest in that famine year. Throughout much of Ogwaro's childhood, in fact, food was a hard-won commodity.
Thus it was that Ogwaro's family often turned to insects as a food source. By the age of five, Ogwaro was building termite traps by day, and using them to gather termites by night. Alone, he would sit near a fire built to attract the flier termites--which in turn attracted frogs to the vicinity, which attracted snakes, and so on up the food chain. He knew that in the darkness beyond the fire lurked hyenas, jackals, leopards, and other creatures that might eat him just as gladly as his family ate the
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