At the Front Lines of the Global Transition
California Pacific coast at sunset. An oil spill in 1969 that soiled beaches in Santa Barbara was an instigating event for Earth Day. Photo/Keith Schneider
OWENSBORO, KY — By now, the 47th observance of Earth Day, the point of summoning people to protect Mother Nature is clear. What started in 1970 as a call to action from the youthful wing of American society has matured into mainstream global operating principles for assuring that human life thrives in the 21st century.
Essentially, that is what the founders of Earth Day anticipated. Earth Day was never just about preventing pollution or conserving imperiled landscapes, though both objectives served as galvanizing ideas for the early annual observances. The organizers correctly predicted that the resource-conserving, waste-reducing, energy-efficient lessons of Earth Day would eventually serve as a development template for nations to succeed.
Natural systems, after all, are powerful. Far more potent, in fact, than mankind’s flimsy transport, food production, electrical distribution, and communications networks. Anybody who tries to switch planes during a mild snowstorm at Chicago O’Hare International Airport knows all about that.
What Happens With Ignorance
What Earth Day’s founders could not have foreseen was how quickly nations would deteriorate by failing to heed environmental values. Mother Earth no longer tolerates wasteful and dirty development paths. Neither do national economies.
Studies of economic performance consistently find that the nations that insist on challenging the Earth’s rapidly evolving environmental conditions are experiencing heightened economic damage — joblessness, social instability, deteriorating health, more poverty, and eroding GDP. South Africa, India, Brazil, Mexico, China, and Russia are visible examples.
One more point. Just as the first Earth Day was inspired by a river that caught fire in Cleveland, Ohio, and a Great Lake that was declared near dead, securing the world’s freshwater reserves is a central goal of Earth Day 2016.
More powerful storms require changes in development strategies around the world. Here, a storm cloud in Indiana. Photo/Keith Schneider
The world recognizes that preventing water pollution is a measure of sound public health management. The world also sees that access to adequate supplies of clean water is an essential economic resource. One reason that American cities have again become some of the world’s most beautiful and livable is the investments made in building new shoreline parks, pedestrian promenades, and neighborhoods along cleaned-up waterways.
Corporate social responsibility executives all over the world spend much of their time today developing new industrial practices that conserve water and use less energy. In California, recycled municipal wastewater, once disparaged as “toilet water,” is now seen as a resource to replenish drinking water aquifers and irrigate cropland. The United Nations last year published its Sustainable Development Goals, a global economic development strategy founded on ecological principles. Access to clean water, and saner water use and consumption, form the basis for 10 of the 17 goals. Read More
Gabrielle Gray and me in California, October 2015. Photo/Keith Schneider
OWENSBORO, KY— I made it. Tomorrow, April 19, 2016 is my 60th birthday. It feels great. Purposeful. Definitive. Fully engaged. Fun.
Turning 60 means you’ve been around for awhile. If I were a kitchen I’d have been remodeled at least three times. If I were a maple tree I’d be 80 feet tall. If I were a blue whale, I’d weigh 150 tons.
Turning 60 means that you’ve learned a few things. You learn that when a woman asks if you’re hungry you don’t say “no.” You head to the fridge and make her a sandwich.
Turning 60 makes you appreciate more the things you didn’t as a younger man — like the color of shutters on a house, or how bike paths are a measure of a city’s quality of life.
Turning 60 means you’re reconciled to life’s episodic bullying, recovered from inescapable misfortune and grief, and made a solemn pact with yourself to keep breathing.
My mother reminds me about how hard I took turning 40. I don’t remember that. I do remember how hard 1996 was, breathing life into a new public interest organization in northern Michigan. I never worked that hard before or since.
Keith Schneider in Cape Town February 2016. Photo/Gabrielle Gray
Turning 50 was a party. In fact it was six parties with family and friends in three states.
Tomorrow I turn 60. That’s 21,900 days. As a guy who’s led an examined life it’s entirely pleasing to note that not many of them got away from me. My dearest friends tell me I’m hopelessly optimistic. My family thinks it’s cute. Gabrielle Gray, my dear, dear partner remarked the other day that when she asks me first thing, ‘How are you?’ I always reply, ‘I’m good.'”
I am good. Never better, actually. By 60 it’s plain that the three most important assets in life are these: Love. Time. Health. There’s no particular universal formula for acquiring them. I found that good fortune, a bit of discipline, and a sizable portion of motivation are involved.
I’m not planning to alter any of the factors that led me to this point and place. I’m just so grateful for all that life spread before me. I love my family, my friends, my home, my work. I know enough to cherish my days and the people in them. After all, tomorrow I turn 60.
— Keith Schneider
Gabrielle Gray and Keith Schneider in Cape Town February 2016. Photo/Keith Schneider
A battle for control of a portion of South Africa’s magnificent Wild Coast has evolved into one of the most dangerous environmental conflicts in the world. Photo/Keith Schneider
Nearly a month after gunmen assassinated Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Radebe, the leader of a community group that opposed a mine and new highway on South Africa’s Wild Coast, the investigation has expanded but no suspects have been identified, according to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, South Africa’s national police unit for investigating corruption and political and organized crime.
“It’s a murder case and we suspect there’s an element of organized crime,” Hlangwani Mulaudzi, the spokesman of the Directorate, told reporters in South Africa.
“There is a task team formed to deal with this case,” Mulaudzi added last week in an interview with Checkpoint, a program of the 24-hour eNews Channel Africa. “There have been huge strides made so far.”
Radebe was attacked on March 22 at one of his repair and storage shops in Port Edward along the Indian Ocean coast, about two hours south of Durban and close to Xolobeni, where a titanium beach mine and freeway are proposed. Witnesses, among them Radebe’s son, said two men, apparently impersonating police officers, arrived after sunset in a white vehicle with blue emergency lights fixed on the roof. Radebe had received a warning about a hitlist prior to the attack. He resisted the gunmen’s order to get in the car and was shot eight times.
Investigators learned that the vehicle had been carjacked with two passengers inside. The gunmen put one of the kidnapped passengers in the trunk and restrained the second in the back seat. Both passengers survived.
The owner of a taxi company raised in the Xolobeni area, 52-year-old Radebe chaired the Amadiba Crisis Committee, a civic group formed in 2007 with hundreds of members who opposed plans to mine the Indian Ocean beach and cross their Pondo tribal lands with a freeway. Radebe and his colleagues were convinced that both developments would wreck the region’s agrarian way of life, and that investments in agriculture, local road repair, and eco-tourism would generate more businesses and jobs that also secured their magnificent coastal homeland.
Conflict Over Development
The Crisis Committee’s steadfast opposition inflamed local supporters of the mine’s Australian developer, Mineral Commodities Ltd., who argued that development would produce economic opportunities. The conflict split Xolobeni as families divided and close friendships dissolved.
The Crisis Committee appeared to win the mining struggle in 2011 when the Department of Mineral Resources revoked the mining license. The 2011 mining license revocation, though, was based on what the department said were weaknesses in the application. The ruling left open the opportunity for Mineral Commodities to restart the licensing process by March 6, 2015. Two days before the deadline, on March 4, 2015, the company submitted a new license application to mine the Indian Ocean beach.
Simultaneously, a year-long reign of violence began against the Amadiba Crisis Committee. Night and daytime attacks on committee members since May 2015 resulted in severe injuries, but were largely viewed as insignificant. Just one attack in December was regarded as worthy of investigation by local officers of the South African Police Service and prosecution by the government. Radebe’s death also fit the era of turmoil engulfing South Africa.
Bazooka Radebe’s death, as well as his funeral, which attracted 3,000 mourners and international television crews, are the most visible events in the furious 10-year struggle. Both events elevated an unpredictable and dangerous conflict over industrial and transportation development on the northern end of South Africa’s Wild Coast to national and international attention.
Xolobeni residents see themselves as heirs to a tradition of stalwart defense of their magnificent Pondo homeland. Like the Pondo tribesmen who spent three years battling Apartheid-era restrictions from 1958 to 1961, members of the Amadiba Crisis Committee vow to block development of their free-flowing rivers, open grasslands, and undeveloped Indian Ocean coast.
A researcher, Dick Forslund has assisted the Amadiba Crisis Committee’s
work to secure the Wild Coast. Photo/Keith Schneider
“The assassination of Sikhosiphi Bazooka has caused a groundswell of opposition, and massive support from civil society organizations all over the country,” said Sinegugu Zukulu, a professional conservationist and a leader of the Amadiba Crisis Committee. “The same can not be said about our government. I think they are hoping to calm things down and continue to push for mining. They have forgotten too soon as history could be telling them about our tribe. In Mpondoland when we say ‘no’ we mean it. We do not change.” Read More
Cape Town’s water supply starts in this valley near Stellenbosch,
north of South Africa’s largest city. Photo/Keith Schneider
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — There may be no other place on Earth where the land unfolds with such breathtaking beauty, where the green waves of KwaZulu-Natal valleys and the purple summits of Karoo desert ridges have such a powerful emotional lease. From the cold blue ocean waters of Cape Town to the limitless highveld expanses of Mpumalanga, South Africa’s geographic magnificence serves to both inspire this nation — and mock its racial divisions, government mismanagement, and misguided carbon-intensive economic strategy.
South Africa has no frilly edges, no centers of juvenile mirth or artifice. There are no enclaves of hyper-intellectual, digitally-driven, fabulously confident venture capitalists investing in online apps that change the world. There are no communities that specialize in making movies like Hollywood, or music like Nashville, or baseball like Cooperstown. One of the country’s most-visited tourist destinations is an Atlantic Ocean island where black activists were imprisoned before they became president. The red carpets that South Africans talk about are not entrances to galas. They are the blood of victims of government-sanctioned massacres.
What South Africa embraces in abundance is passion. Passion for the land. Passion for progress. Passion for 22 years of liberty since the 1994 elections that ended Apartheid. Passion to prove that the endowment of optimism, the allegiance to justice that led to the election of Nelson Mandela as the new republic’s first president isn’t lost in a gout of corruption and cronyism fostered by Jacob Zuma, the nation’s fourth president. “What scares me the most in current day South Africa,” writes Solly Moeng, a communications consultant, in the April 13, 2006 edition of Fin24.com, “is the growing realization that we have placed our fate squarely into the hands of a bunch of politicians who, now faced with the growing prospects of losing much of the power they’ve taken for granted all along, might stop at nothing to retain it.”
The 96-megawatt Jasper solar station in Northern Cape province. Photo/Keith Schneider
Passion steers South Africa’s progress now. In seven weeks of travel, in talking to scores of people of all races and ages in eight of the country’s nine provinces, people expressed their deep frustration about the country’s mounting social and economic turmoil. They displayed a patriot’s commitment to understand the sources of the tumult and resolve them. And everyone marveled at the gifts that God and nature had bestowed on their beloved country.
TISA. This is South Africa. Here are other notable features of South Africa’s distinctive place on Earth:
Love — Though too many black South Africans struggle with numbing joblessness and poverty, and too many white South Africans despair at the diminished state of their country, blacks and whites share the most important human values. South Africans are generous, unselfish, and full of love. Everywhere in South Africa we were invited into homes, hugged and fed, and celebrated as new friends and not as strangers. Our experiences in black communities were especially appealing. Though millions of black families live in informal settlements with limited access to running water and decent sanitation, the grinding conditions seem not to have diminished the communal tribal culture that has developed over centuries. Families live together in two or three homes side by side, whether it’s in informal settlements, on a suburban street, or in compounds of round thatched-roof huts in the countryside. Wherever they reside, black families share resources, and rely on younger adults to care for babies and the elders. Communities also do the same. People gather in groups to consider facts and reach decisions collectively. The communal culture builds trust and produces generous volumes of love that black South Africans lavish on each other and on visitors.
A laid off farmworker with her children on a sugarcane farm in Pongola. Photo/Keith Schneider
Despair — For nearly a century, until the practice ended in 1994, South Africa’s white Afrikaans Apartheid government bullied its black, colored, and Indian communities. Whites occupied the best jobs, the best neighborhoods, the choicest lands. People of the three other races, and especially black South Africans, were confined to designated neighborhoods and regions without liberty to travel, go to good schools, buy land, or seek employment outside of menial labor. The oppression produced viral hatred of government. The election of Nelson Mandela as the first black president in 1994, and the adoption of a constitution that stressed human rights and justice, produced waves of popular optimism about opening a new era of freedom and opportunity fostered by a competent government elected by all of the people. Two decades into the 21st century, though, South Africa is managed by an ineffective and corrupt administration making numerous poor decisions about economic development and social progress. South Africans of every race despise what’s happening to their country. One consequence is that President Jacob Zuma is under siege from South Africans and opposition parties seeking his impeachment. See Circle of Blue’s Choke Point: South Africa archive here.
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Orange River in South Africa is the most important source of fresh water for the Karoo. Photo/Keith Schneider
GRAAFF-REINET, South Africa –A contentious idea to use billions of gallons of scarce water to develop natural gas brought Stefan Cramer, a respected German-trained groundwater scientist, to settle in a 19th century cottage, with stucco walls and a mud and reed roof, near the center of South Africa’s desert Karoo.
A well-regarded hydrogeologist with decades of experience in some of the world’s important oil and gas fields, Cramer was dispatched to the Karoo two years ago by the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute. His assignment: add scientific rigor to the Cape Town-based organization’s campaign to block fracking in a spectacular landscape of eroding granite and unrelenting sun.
For a brief few years, largely as the result of a 2011 U.S. government estimate of potential reserves, South Africa entertained the idea that the 450,000 square-kilometer (174,000 square miles) desert Karoo might become a world-class natural gas field. Cramer, who is 64-years-old and lives in this historic and lovely Afrikaans desert town with his wife, Erika, did not need to do much to help halt South Africa’s flirtation with shale gas.
The 96-megawatt Jasper solar station in Northern Cape province. Photo/Keith Schneider
Though SAFCEI and other groups remain vigilant, fracking the Karoo is an idea that is slipping away. Plunging fuel prices, the complete absence of an expensive pipeline transport network, scarce water, faint understanding of the Karoo’s deep geology, and fierce public opposition has turned the South Africa Department of Energy’s fracking division into a quiet repository for an approach to fossil fuel production that is unfit for its place and time.
It is another improbable energy pursuit, though, that Cramer tripped over last year that keeps him grounded here. South Africa wants to build six nuclear power plants. Its senior leaders see in the Karoo’s billion-year-old geology, expansive valleys, and table-top summits fertile territory for supplying uranium, and perhaps hosting a new uranium enrichment plant.
Cramer calculates that uranium development will consume 700,000 cubic meters (185 million gallons) of water annually. Like all of the canvas of color and the banquet of quiet that is the Karoo, the region 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of here, around Beaufort West where much of the development is centered, has meager existing water reserves.
“The Apartheid government closed mining and uranium enrichment in 1992 before the black government came to power,” said Cramer in an interview with Circle of Blue. “South Africa now plans to restart the entire nuclear cycle. That includes mining, uranium enrichment, and power generation. First it’s using millions of cubic meters of water to frack shale gas in the Karoo. Now it’s millions of cubic meters for uranium. None of it makes sense to me.”
Cramer is a tall, sturdy bearded scientist whose public interest instincts are keen. His manner, welcoming and direct, is much like the 230-year Dutch-style high desert town that because of him and his wife has become a center of anti-uranium research and organizing. Opposition headquarters is a cool and airy cottage with a glorious garden that rests in the lee of the Snowy Mountains.
The irony of South Africa, certainly the irrational feature of South Africa’s headlong pursuit of risky gas and uranium reserves, argues Cramer, is that the Karoo also hosts one of the world’s most fruitful new wind and solar energy sectors.
The Dutch Reform Church is the centerpiece of 230-year-old Graaff-Reinet, South Africa’s fourth oldest town. Photo/Keith Schneider
Wind farms are tucked into mountain passes and spread across open desert in all three Cape provinces that form the Karoo. A solar corridor has opened in Northern Cape province. In the desert between Kimberley and Postmasburg, in a dry valley surrounded by low hills, SolarReserve opened the 96-megawatt Jasper solar photovoltaic power station and its sister 75-megawatt Lesedi solar station in 2014 at a cost of nearly $500 million. The expanse of electricity generating panels installed by the Santa Monica, California-based company reflects the sun and the sky, and is so large that from a distance both stations look like shimmering blue lakes.
“South Africa put the right people in charge of its renewable development. The program has good management and it’s working,” said Kevin Smith, the chief executive of SolarReserve, which is scheduled to start construction of a 100-megawatt, $US 750 million concentrating solar station at the same desert site later this year. “They are conscientious and they want the program to be successful.”
Magic and Import of the Karoo
There is not a better place to ascend South Africa’s mountains of clean energy production and descend its unfaltering slopes of ill-conceived fossil and uranium energy convention than the magnificent Karoo. Encircling a third of South Africa’s geography, the desert starts in the east close to the mountains of Lesotho, heads north nearly to Johannesburg, reaches south almost to Cape Town and west to within 100 kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean.
Valley of Desolation is an example of the magnificent and harsh Karoo geography. Photo/Keith Schneider
Millions of years ago the Karoo was the bottom of a teeming sea. Over the last 170 years herds of cattle and flocks of sheep grazed its grasses and woody desert shrubs, and trampled the thin and rocky soils. Here and there hard rock mines opened to exploit underground mineral seams.
Thinly populated, with towns hours distant from one another, the Karoo’s hot desert extends to the sides of mammoth table top ridges that turn purple at dusk. This canvas of color and light, of rock and mountain and glorious sunsets has inspired generations of South African poets and artists.
Its seared ground, relentless sun, and temperatures that can change 25 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) from day to night have driven countless Karoo settlers to despair. The ageless desert has been called the ruinous landscape between heaven and hell.
It is fitting that such a region so central to South Africa’s geography and history is now the stage for another of the momentous choices confronting the nation at the bottom of the continent. If facts and outcomes were the sole factors, the choice would seem straightforward.
Stefan Cramer, a groundwater scientist and one of leading opponents of uranium mining in the Karoo. Photo/Keith Schneider
Clean Energy Works
Since construction started in 2012, 13 wind power plants and 31 solar generating stations have opened in South Africa. They generate nearly 2,400 megawatts of electrical capacity, according to the most recent published tally by the South Africa Department of Energy. To date $US 6 billion has been invested in South African clean energy. The Karoo hosts nearly three quarters of the renewable plants constructed so far.
Another 49 renewable plants are in various stages of construction, financing, and permitting in the Karoo and nationally. A new round of government bids for building renewable energy plants, the fifth since 2011, is expected to begin later this year.
South Africa’s renewable sector is putting 1,000 new megawatts of generating capacity online annually, according to the Department of Energy. Plants are being built in 24 to 30 months on average, and coming online on schedule and close to budget. The country appears well on the way to reaching the national target of 6,000 new megawatts of renewable generating capacity by 2020, and 18,000 by 2030. No South Africa industrial infrastructure project in the 21st century has come close to this level of achievement.
Vanderkloof Dam on the Orange River holds back one of South Africa’s largest reservoirs. Photo/Keith Schneider
One of the primary reasons is that none of the new plants, according to government summaries, come with the inordinate expense, technical challenges, severe environmental damage, and fierce public resistance that are the proven consequences of developing conventional sources of energy in South Africa.
The issue raised in the Karoo, and in academic circles across South Africa, is why, despite the glittering achievement of wind and solar development, senior government leaders are so intent on devoting the majority of government capital and focus to old and polluting fuel sources?
— Keith Schneider
To see the entire report on energy development and the Karoo visit Circle of Blue.
To read all of the Choke Point: South Africa reports visit here.
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