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G21 AFRICA - A CHANGE MUST COME. MPHUTHUMI NTABENI speaks to our Focus Issue of 2006, water.
East London, SOUTH AFRICA - My love of watery and mountainous landscapes goes back to my boyhood in Zingquthu, my father's rural home where I grew up until I was 9 years old. The whole province of Eastern Cape is scenic in South Africa, the testimony to which are numerous Frontier Wars (British vs Xhosas) during the ninetieth century when the British encroached over the land. I'm glad to report that our present government is on target to provide water for every household before 2012, something the apartheid regime didn't have the political will to do in its lifetime.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni When I visited Zingquthu, after close to two decades, two years ago it came as a shock to me how much the physical landscape had been transformed. Most rivers were either dead or dying. I just didn't understand that climatic changes could be so drastic as to cause so many rivers to dry up over such a short space of time. I was told the problem was not only climatic changes but also cuts made to alter the course of rivers, draining marshes and moors, gravity dams an d harbours, and all such stuff associated with industrial revolution.
My father's brother, the only person remaining in their home, is semi-illiterate, but it came as revelation to me when we sat around the fire that night and he taught me the impact the disappearing rivers has had in their village.
"We use to push the cattle further up the mountains to graze," he said with glazed eyes. "Then we'd go hunting or fishing. Some men even use to pan for gold in the gravel of waterways that meandered across the floodplains." I was remembering reading from the local paper in Port Elizabeth that the government department of Environmental Affairs has decided to close down some areas to enable natural recovery. My uncle interrupted my thoughts.
"Everything we did then use to be determined by the seasons. We would plough maize during summer, cabbages in winter, wheat, rye, lurcene and in between. Now nothing survives; the seasons are messed up, if it's not rust, it's insects eating the fields; nothing survive except you have money to buy insecticides and for irrigation schemes. People just don't have money for such things. That's why you find us with our hands on our chins doing nothing. We can't even feed ourselves."
The sad part is that most of these man-made changes, when you research them, are just a tale of profit for the elite few; first it was the colonialists and their obsession with huge farmlands and hunting coverts that almost wiped out our wild life. Now it's the golf courses and holiday resorts to maintain the habitats of the rich at the expense of disappearing livelihoods of poor communities suffering behind diverted rivers and man-made reservoirs.
Golf clubs predominate our costal belt from the Eastern Cape to Cape Town. But this is not about rich vs poor, the problem requires a change of lifestyles. The impact of the rich on the environment is more severe because they've more resources. The earth's ability to sustain us while renewing itself is failing, and things are starting to fire up. The facts are there for everyone to analyse, yet we're caught up in the proverbial ostrich-like head in the sand, hoping the problem will just go away on its own.
Rainy seasons are rapidly disappearing in northern Kenya. Environmental issues might still be somehow adjunct to other aspects Africans' difficult lives but the collapse of the environmentally sound Earth systems will eventually affect all of us. Problems of the environment are no longer just about whether beautiful rivers are drying up or being polluted; they've become a crucial life and death issue.
Some argue that the Earth has undergone unusual climatic change before, and can survive once more. What this argument misses is the fact that the earth was undergoing its natural life cycle then. This time the changes are caused by man's negative effect on the environment. Scientists tell us that we are 'already utilising half of the planet's photosynthetic capacity (its ability to convert sunlight into plant material).' They say that by the 'mid-century we will be using most of it. More than half of the world's original area of forests has either been destroyed or artificially converted into other uses, mostly industrial. Most of the world's major fish stocks have collapsed because of our depredations; others are in serious steep decline.'
We are already using most of the world's fresh water in rivers and lakes for irrigation, industrial purposes, or in people's homes. Most of all, we are 'pumping into the atmosphere at a rapidly rising rate enormous volumes of waste gases, principally carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, resulting in an increased retention of the sun's heat.' And the temperature rises of global warming are melting glaciers at an alarming rate, which in turn raises the sea level that leads to abnormal climate changes and floods. All this, in turn, threatens among much else to make agriculture unviable in much of the world. All this signifies is that as Earth's stewards we are certainly not doing a great job and are seriously running out of time to nurture the Earth back to health.
Earth's natural systems cannot be sustained for much longer, and is likely to produce disaster on a global scale in the coming century. The storms turning into tornadoes, turning into tsunamis are no coincidences. The Earth is precariously balanced and staring to send us clear messages that things are tilting towards a disaster if we somehow don't find ways to meet the present demands of industrial growth and population growth. The seemingly unstoppable assault on the natural world may very well encompass the end of human civilisation if something is not done soon.
© 2006, GENERATOR 21.
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