CLIMATE SCIENTISTS have begun talking about a strategic 'managed retreat' as a response to climate change. This retreat they say is not an admission of defeat, but rather entails "a coordinated movement of people and buildings away from risks, whi...
Environment
Explore our environmental coverage and climate activism content.
Greens should challenge notion that banks determine “Environmental Leadership”
In 2016, 'two men pretending to be police officers' murdered Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Radebe the founder of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, an environmental group opposed to mining in Umgungundlovu in Eastern Mpondoland. In November this year, Fikile Ntshangase, deputy chairperson of the Mfolozi Commu...
Towards an African, humanist environmentalism for South Africa
IT WAS during the dying days of apartheid, that I wrote a series of articles promoting 'ecological sustainable development' and deep ecology. The pieces published by Grassroots and South Press were extraordinary, the least of which is that they were published by a working class imprint shortly af...
COVID-19: Our People’s Health is an Environmental Issue
SOUTH AFRICA is one of the few countries to have secured the right to a healthy environment alongside the right to health in its constitution, yet it took the crisis of a global pandemic for apartheid-era hostels in Alexander township to be deep cleaned. As our own Department of Health moved to c...
Dear Extinction Generation
IT WAS June of 1991, the apartheid government had just unbanned political parties such as the ANC and PAC, exiles were returning to the country, and negotiations towards a new democratic dispensation were in full sway. The First National Conference on Environment & Development, organised by mysel...
Revisiting Eskom Liberalisation and the Energy Commons
ALMOST a decade ago, I started openly talking about an Energy Commons yet plans mooted for splitting up Eskom remain stalled. One plan calls for splitting the parastatel into two units, another into three, but the price of electricity continues to outstrip inflation in leaps and bounds. The basic...
South Africa’s Anti-Climate Science lobby
IF THE latest IPCC intergovernmental report on climate change, didn't draw your attention to the dire impacts of global warming at 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels then a new study of the Earth's oceans, showing the planet is much more sensitive to fossil-fuel emissions than past studies have s...
Has the environmental movement failed?
THE announcement of a green-light to Karoo fracking couldn't have come at a worse time. The very same week, saw the world pummelled by kill the environment ideologue Donald Trump, who two days ago, scrapped Obama climate change policies. Thus Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane was merely...
Dawn of environmentalism: eco-activism during apartheid
DURING the struggle I was active on campus. Following the campus unrest at UCT, similar in many respects to the current youth revolt against the system, I enrolled in a course in environmental geoscience whilst also studying politics. It became clear the way forward was to ‘politicise ecology and...
Edna Molewa’s SASOL greenwashing faux pas
IT IS NOT often that one gets to see blatant greenwashing non-science on SABC, 'the use of marketing to portray an organization's products, activities or policies as environmentally friendly when they are not'. The latest antics of the Dept of Environment's Edna Molewa is possibly a low-point in...
Ivo Vegter’s rampant denialism
THAT people like Ivo Vegter get given column space on the strength of an untested book purporting to debunk campaigns against fracking, nuclear power, climate change and environmentalism in general, is a sign of the insatiable rise of right-wing politics, of the kind that has lead to the ascenden...
Old King Coal be damned
WHEN the electric icebox was invented, thousands of ice haulers went out of business. At the turn of the 20th century, nearly every family, grocer, and barkeeper in South Africa had an icebox. But ironically, South Africa's dependence on ice created the very technology that would lead to the dec...
Burning Platinum no solution to power crisis
IMAGINE if our President were to announce that he had a solution to our energy crisis. From tomorrow we will start burning Platinum to make Electricity. Would you support a costly programme, with only 1% efficiency, and a huge waste problem? This is precisely what the Pressurised Light Water Reac...
South Africa’s shambolic energy policy
THAT South Africa's energy policy suffers from incoherence can be seen in the 2010 Integrated Resource Plan for Electricity published by the Department of Energy. The prevailing attitude fostered by so many self-proclaimed experts and advisers to the ministry, is that renewables should comprise...