Man Friday: An environmental spring is in the air

 

First published in Die Burger.

Spring. The season of renewal, of growth, of optimism, a catchword to describe small revolutions – the Paris Spring, the Prague Spring, the Arab Spring.

More ominously, Rachel Carson famously wrote of the Silent Spring, in her devastating book about how pesticides, and especially DDT, were changing the face of the Earth. It is one of the most influential works of our time, a book widely regarded as heralding the birth of the modern environmental movement and of “deep ecology”.

Here in South Africa, we are emerging from our own season – the long, bleak winter of the Jacob Zuma years, years in which corruption become entrenched in our body politic, where the term “State Capture” entered our everyday lexicon.

A core element of State Capture, and of that long, bleak winter, was our energy sector. Nuclear deals with Russia, coal mines the new gold mines as supply contracts went to the Guptas, Eskom was looted, and the infrastructure on which it all depended was stripped bare as a corrupt elite stole our crown jewels.

But hark (as the Bard might say), is that a Piet-my-vrou I hear calling in the halls of state? The red-chested cuckoo has always been our South African harbinger of spring: its Zulu name, uphezukomkhono, means “on the arm”, the season to put one’s arm to the hoe and plough the fields ready for the summer rains.

There are signs our own quiet spring, our own uphezukomkhono, may be upon us. It’s a phrase here, a statement there, the use of language by our politicians that indicate a new intelligence about our environment may have dawned.

Barbara Creecy, Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environmental Affairs, is speaking that language. On October 1, she spoke of developing a “conservation consciousness” among all South Africans, saying that “climate change, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation are happening now”.

She spoke of the need for evidence-based decision-making, grounded in science, a key element of progressive conservation globally, something Donald Trump does not understand.

Even more significantly, and something that has gone completely under the radar (and thanks to Professor Mark Swilling for his radar detector), was the October 2 ANC NEC statement. Noting the impact of climate change, the NEC said “the Integrated Resource Plan should articulate the lowest-cost option for the future energy mix for South Africa, with increased contributions from renewable energy sources. The NEC agreed to develop a strategy on a just transition to a low-carbon path of development”.

That combination of phrases – “lowest-cost”, just transition”, “low-carbon path” and “renewable energy” is quietly earth-shattering, a quiet spring, uphezukomkhono.

It means the NEC has accepted that coal is an anachronism and that there must be a “just transition” — a trade union phrase to signal a way to integrate workers’ jobs into new modes of sustainable production in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. It signals that that new way will be “lowest-cost” (renewables) and “low-carbon” (renewables).

I’m not holding my breath, but if I were nuclear power and coal mining’s number one cheerleader, Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe, I would keep very quiet right now.

Spring is in the air. DM