Many of you will have seen the dramatic pictures of the fire that swept through a Khayelitsha shantytown on New Year’s Eve. Some of you may have driven along the N2 this last week, past visible sections of the devastation. And I know that a few of you who read this blog have been in BM Section, working with the thousands of displaced people seeking short term and long term habitat solutions that are safer and generally better than those obliterated by the flames.
For many people our universal future is feared as a post-apocalyptic dystopia stripped of wild nature and social order. BM Section this week is a sensational and grossly exaggerated manifestation of such a nightmare. But at the same time it is a harrowing reality faced every year by thousands of our fellow Capetonians.
In the ashes of BM Section and scores of similar fires in our slums it is difficult to think beyond survivalist needs. Poverty and the environment seem like polar opposites. It is easy to wonder how one can think about nature when there are challenges that are much bigger and much more immediate?
And so it is that we fail to go beyond traditional imageries, in which environment and nature are seen as elitist interests, while poverty alleviation and socio-economic exclusion are seen as the real priorities, seeking the urgent attention of the State. As a result our policy makers and ourselves do not see the upgrading of informal settlements as a challenge that is fundamentally environmental, and we do not see the preservation of our natural environment as something that should be a matter of concern for the 20% of our urban population that live in slums.
At the very least this is a failure of the collective imagination. We fail to envisage a society better than the one we live in – not just a survivable world, but a nature-rich world in which all children can thrive; a world in which nature has its place in low-income neighbourhoods and our low-income neighbours have a place in our remaining areas of natural beauty.
I am pre-occupied by these ideas when I am working and walking on the mountain at BlueGumsFree. The restoration of the mountainside is not only a nature lover’s project. It is linked to a fervent wish to make a contribution to our city becoming an engine of biodiversity. And by this I do not mean a vigorously managed national park surrounded by concentric rings of gated green suburbs and miles and miles of blighted urban sprawl.
In the limited confines of my own daily life, my conservation work at BlueGumsFree is a small contribution to a nascent movement to create nature where we live and work and learn – whether in Castle Rock or in Khayelitsha.
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