Gauteng Smallholder Gauteng Smallholder November 2011 | Page 51

THE BACK PAGE
What a mess we’ve made of it!
I
f you were to sail due westwards from an Angolan port ~
say Lobito ~ towards South America, you would, in the
middle of the ocean, sail slap-bang into a large patch of
floating plastic rubbish. The same would happen if you were to
sail from a port on the bulge of Africa towards the Caribbean, or
from either of the west coasts of North or South America across
the Pacific. Or from Australia to Madagascar.
For you would have sailed into one of five mid-oceanic gyres,
or gentle whirlpools, which have quietly been attracting and
concentrating floating plastic garbage over the past few decades.
Out of sight and out of mind, because not many people go
there, the largest of these floating rubbish dumps are thousands
of square kilometres in extent, and scientists are starting to
believe the Pacific ones at least are having an effect on the
temperature of the ocean surface, and therefore, by virtue of
the El Nino/La Nina effect, on the climate of the southern and
northern hemispheres, ours included.
Meanwhile, in London and large old cities around the world, a
truly disgusting phenomenon is amassing itself: that of the
“fatberg.” A fatberg is a congealed, hardened mass of old
cooking oil, fat and solid waste in the form of disposable
nappies and other unmentionables that slowly, like plaque in an
artery, blocks up a sewer line, eventually sealing it off so that
spectacular fountains of raw sewage explode into the bath-
rooms and kitchens of unsuspecting victims upstream.
In the US oil companies have destroyed thousands of hectares
of rural landscape, not to mention rural economies and
communities while chasing up a few billions barrels of oil
through fracking. The same fate hangs over our Karroo.
Down Under they have their own problems. The Great Barrier
Reef, the only living organism visible from space (it being many
hundreds of kilometres long and made up of living coral) is
dying. In fact it's almost dead, as a result of high ocean tempera-
tures and acidification in the water.
The oceans generally were a fruitful source of food for millions
(and South Africa had one of the most fruitful fishing industries
in the world). Nowadays, fish has become a luxury, unless you
enjoy the less-and-less appealing species now being touted as
delicious (and which previously were turned into fishmeal).
Up in Russia, the Aral Sea, previously one of the world's biggest
fresh water lakes, is dry. Gone. And Lake Baikal, the world's
deepest fresh water lake (as deep as Johannesburg is high above
sea level) is drying up, with revolting killer algal blooms causing
the extinction of the lake's most iconic (and unique) salmon.
In Germany, an entymological study has revealed a dramatic
drop in the number of free-flying insects, and we all know the
crisis facing bee populations worldwide.
Right on your doorstep you may have noticed changes too. You
may have picked up new species of insects and plants creeping
in to your environment. On our plot, for example, there were
no lizards here 25 years ago: it was too cold for them. Neither
were there snails. Now both are plentiful. In our skies we never
saw grey loeries. Now they are all
over the place.
Think of the changes out in the
veld. For decades the most
prevalent highveld roadside
weeds were Cosmos, blackjack
and khakibos, kindly introduced
to the country by the British
Army at the time of the Anglo-
Boer War.
Then, when this magazine started
18 years ago, pom-pom weed
was first to be seen on the
roadside verges of the West
Rand. Now, pom-pom weed is a
national scourge, joined by the
bright orange Mexican poppy which, too, has spread from west
to east in the ensuing years.
As a youngster growing up in Pretoria I remember our parents
talking about the “civil servants' storm”, a violent thunder and
lightning storm, accompanied by a quick, heavy downpour
which would occur, with metronomous regularly, every summer
afternoon at precisely 4pm ~ just the time when civil servants
wer