The indigenous forester of Smutsville

While I was staying in Wilderness over the holidays, a friend took me to meet William Pedro of Smutsville township, Sedgefield, who has for the last 15 years been running a successful indigenous tree nursery tucked away in the forest at the foot of a coastal dune.

Sedgefield is a largely white community with a great many retired people, notorious for petty complaints to the local authorities. Smutsville, the impoverished township that supplies Sedgefield’s labour and soaks up its poverty, is hidden away out of sight in the coastal dunes, and Pedro’s nursery is hidden away in thickets at the foot of one of these dunes. You’d not know it’s there, looking from the cluttered streets of the townships, where the presence of two white men in my friend’s bakkie (small pickup) provokes sarcastic and, um, colourful comments from some locals as we drive by.

Speaking in Afrikaans, Pedro tells us about the droughts he has seen in this region, particularly around 1960, when rivers that usually flow strongly dried up completely.

“The earth has its own cycles; when it must, it reduces the human population with sickness or disaster. I have learned these things over 50 years of observation.”

“When the Department of Land Affairs pulled out from this venture, I had to make this nursery work myself.”

Now he supplies trees to numerous other local retail nurseries – which probably sell them for four times what he charges. He is highly critical of the dependence of many in his community on government and white people for money and work.

On a sweltering day, his nursery was a small, cool paradise beneath the trees, where he is now in the midst of planting a million new seedlings that hopefully will end up around the much-deforested southern Cape to slow climate change and species loss.

Buddhist economics

I have recently done a couple of public talks on ‘Buddhism and economics’, explaining how the absence of values from contemporary discussions of economics undermines human life and dignity. While people tend to think of religions as being either Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, etc, I argue that religions are the things we put faith in — and that in the Western milieu, even those of us offering allegiance to formal traditions in fact put all too much faith in consumerism, economic growth and the high priests and oracles we call economists.

So, ‘economics’ — understood here not so much as a science but as a cultural phenomenon — has become a destructive contemporary cult that elevates discussions of costs and disregards ethics, engages in empty and mindblowingly expensive rituals such as investment banking, peddles unscientific myths about resource limits, reduces living beings to statistics and turns a blind eye to growing global inequality, and accelerating ecocide.

Remedies include rebuilding democracy, establishing economies based on employee ownership, reducing income inequality, shifting from GDP measurement to different metrics for social and economic success — learning to feel more for others, ‘consume less, share better’ and slow down. Here’s the presentation that goes with the talk, constantly evolving on the rather wonderful Prezi.com.

Business Day: ‘Stop giving the government a free pass on nuclear power’

Published in Business Day, 25 November 2011

‘The nuclear path will compound centralisation and elitism, and necessitate importing skilled foreign labour’

No plan, nowhere to put it - for over thirty years, Eskom has been stacking up high-level nuclear waste, that will be dangerous for thousands of years, in Koeberg.

IS SA about to multiply and repeat the R40bn arms-deal debacle that has haunted our politics for more than a decade? The government’s decision to invest more than R1-trillion in six nuclear reactors — the equivalent of 30 arms deals — risks being a disaster for our fraying governance as well as for the economy. The amounts of money involved in the nuclear deal are an obvious magnet for corruption; the security risks inherent in the technology offer a million more excuses for secrecy.

The nuclear decision is justified by the conventional wisdom that we need infrastructure-intensive economic development to meet “the needs of our people”, that economic development demands economic growth, and economic growth demands huge power stations. Some consider it to be a necessary low-carbon alternative: South Africans are mostly unaware of the technological revolution unfolding globally in the renewable energy sector.

Activists question the nuclear decision on the grounds of radiation and proliferation risks. They point out that no country has solved the problem of how to deal with high- level radioactive waste and that it is highly unlikely that a problem that has so far defeated the likes of the US and Japan will be solved by SA. Despite having had nearly 20 years since the end of apartheid to find a responsible solution for managing high-level waste, Eskom continues to stack it up in racks at Koeberg, just as was done — disastrously — at Fukushima. The National Radioactive Waste Disposal Institute, unfunded,

South Africa slowly shredding democracy, in line with international best practice

Following yesterday’s passage by the National Assembly of the Protection of State Information Bill, and the Black Tuesday campaign’s comparison with the days of apartheid, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether ‘this takes us back to the dark days of apartheid’. And a lot of anger from those, including the government, who says it’s ridiculous to make that comparison.

“The only result this unfortunate comparison and the planned campaign, in which people are urged to dress in black, will achieve is to dilute the real history of the Black Wednesday and insult the victims of apartheid’s barbaric laws,” said ANC Chief Whip Mathole Motshekga in a statement.

Of course, it would be quite wrong to suggest that we are now back in the darkest days of apartheid. But Motshekga’s statement ignores the trend. And the trend is away from freedom. His argument that “the rejection of a public interest defence is in line with international best practice on security in the US, Canada and the UK” is chilling, and not only because he is factually incorrect, as Pierre de Vos has pointed out (there is a public interest defence in Canada).

Because what passes for democracy

SAFCEI, COP 17 and climate change

I am, until the end of February, working part-time as a communications officer for the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute, which works to raise awareness of environmental issues amongst the various faith communities. (My connection with SAFCEI evolved out of my long-time Buddhist practice and my media work.)

SAFCEI, along with various partners across the subcontinent, has been working hard to raise awareness of the UN climate change conference beginning next week in Durban, COP 17. Our biggest event will be a huge mass rally of the faith communities (and others), on Sunday 27 November in Durban’s Kings Park Stadium, aiming to remind the COP of the ethics of dealing with climate change. This last Sunday, I was interviewed for half an hour on CapeTalk/702 by Kate Turkington about the rally, the COP and climate change.

For the last year, I’ve also been running a blog that’s a minor clearing house for information relating to general civil society activities at COP 17, now pulling close to 1,000 hits a day.

A UN office building without any light switches that’s also a power station

After a taxing day in Nairobi working to finalise a declaration of African faith leaders on climate change, it was good to take a break and a tour with some senior African clergy of an amazing new office building constructed here on the UN’s Gigiri compound to house staff of the UN Environment Programme. (Our SAFCEI/AACC/Procmura conference was kindly hosted by UNEP.)

‘Climate justice for sustainable peace in Africa’

African faith leaders gathered to discuss climate change at UNEP in Nairobi. Not yet panicking.

[I was part of the team that drafted this statement.]

A message from African faith leaders to the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), from 29 November – 9 December 2011 in Durban, South Africa. 

You must treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It is loaned to you by your children. – Kikuyu proverb

1. Introduction 

Africa is a continent of the faithful. We gathered as African faith leaders at UNEP in Nairobi, Kenya on 7^th and 8^th June 2011, to discuss climate change and how it will be addressed at COP17.

Scientific reports indicate that climate change may well be the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced, with, on current targets,

Sunday Times: ‘Stop these crimes against humanity’

SA negotiators at COP 16 in Mexico

Published in The Sunday Times, 20 March 2011

Climate breakdown is destroying the lives of millions, but SA has merely adopted a morally bankrupt position, writes David Le Page

Parliament has been holding hearings on South Africa’s climate change green paper. We must hope truth will emerge, for the truth is a hard thing to come by when it concerns the global addiction to fossil fuels.

The danger posed by further carbon emissions is now so great, and the evidence for that danger now so overwhelming, that any proposal to expand fossil-fuel production – not least the natural gas exploitation plans of Shell, Sasol and others in the Karoo – should now be regarded as a crime against humanity.

When government licenses continued fossil-fuel production – in the absence of an absolute commitment to a low or zero-carbon economy – it, too, is committing a crime against humanity. And when the media fail to communicate this crisis, they are complicit in crimes against humanity.

South Africa hosts companies that claim to be concerned about climate change – yet their international colleagues fund climate change deniers in the US Congress. Such behaviour, by ArcelorMittal, BP, Bayer and others, is dangerous and disgraceful.