We care about our land

In a letter to the editor of my local newspaper recently, a reader asked why the media always tended to focus on negativity in our society and rarely on the things we South Africans do well. Which got me thinking about what we do as a nation that would make God proud of us. It didn’t take long for me to realise that in the first 15 years of democracy, South Africa has taken an encouraging number of initiatives in terms of protecting its God-given environment.

That’s not to say that South Africans have not always been conscious of the delicate balance of nature and how easily it can be upset. Unlike many other societies who plunder their natural forests for timber, grazing and farmland, South Africans have never liked cutting down trees. Quite the opposite in fact, because whenever trees in public places need to be removed for whatever the reason, there is a huge public outcry.

Architects have long learnt to try to preserve as many trees as possible on building sites, often incorporating them into the buildings. And when trees stand in the way of urgent and inevitable progress, property developers have to handle the issue with care.

This is probably because South Africa is not really a naturally forested country. Its commercial hub, the province of Gauteng, was treeless, rolling grassland before the settlers came and planted trees. And plant trees they did. The early settlers of Johannesburg a little over a century ago gave urgent attention to planting as many trees as they could. Today Johannesburg is the most treed city in the world. So much so that when the geographic survey satellites pass over South Africa, they register semi-desert until they arrive over Johannesburg and suddenly register rain forest.

But now the citizens of Johannesburg — who love their trees, especially the profusion of jacaranda that line the major arteries and suburban streets and cover the city in a magnificent mantle of bright purple blooms every November — are having to deal with some painful environmental realities. One of these is that any jacaranda tree (originally imported from Brazil) that dies is not allowed to be replaced by an exotic tree, but only by something indigenous.

Not only that: all over the country, the imported Australian wattle trees that grow in profusion and the Eucalyptus groves in their thousands, are both being cut down in river beds and their roots poisoned because they soak up so much precious water.

While it makes environmental sense to do away with these exotic plants and trees, bird lovers are indignant; they say not being indigenous does not mean that local birds do not enjoy using these trees for nesting.

And talking of birds, these too are protected by all the citizens of South Africa with enormous zeal. For a father to suggest to his young son in this country that they go out for a morning of sport to shoot birds is not only unthinkable, but considered cruel and heartless. It is always a shock to South Africans who visit Europe and watch in dismay during the annual bird migration how the hunting season is opened for a few weeks to allow the shooting of birds as they move on their journey from one hemisphere to the other. It is something most South Africans simply cannot understand, how seemingly civilised people can shoot down anything with wings, no matter how rare and inedible.

In a basically dry country such as South Africa, fire has always been the environmentalists’ enemy number one. But recent studies have shown that often fire is a friend and not a foe. In the Western Cape, where there is a greater variety of plant species than in the entire northern hemisphere, some seeds are in fact propagated only by fire.

There is no question that in South Africa, where the environment is protected with considerable zeal by most people, animals have a very special place. Though South Africa might be a developing nation and still in the adolescence of democracy, trying hard to keep up with the developed nations of the world, when it comes to the environment, it can certainly teach the world more than just a thing or two. That’s because environmental consciousness here is not just something that appears on the statute books, but is well and truly ensconced in the national psyche.

I am sure that among all the crime, crookery and disregard for human life that is so much part of our daily lives, God manages to see that we are working hard at least at preserving his fauna and flora.