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IGNORING NATURE

A SACRED PLACE

The coastal road from Port Elizabeth to East London is busy with trucks carrying loads of pineapples and cars carrying holidaymakers and Eastern Cape administration officials, intent on their pursuits of business or pleasure. At one point, the vehicles speed across a bridge within a stone’s throw of a small tributary of a river that rises a few miles from the sea. As Thoreau wrote of Walden pond, ‘the scenery is on a humble scale and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur’ (Thoreau, 1854: 183). This river valley is home to a number of wild creatures, though not as many as when the English settler Thomas Pringle visited the area in 1823 and reported that it was thick with antelope, elephants and hippopotami. For the indigenous Xhosa peoples, it is a sacred place. I once found a reed basket filled with pumpkin seeds floating in the water, and when I looked carefully, a calabash of sorghum beer and a small basket of white beans hidden in the reeds. I have been told that these were offerings to the ‘abantu bomlambo’ (‘the people of the river’). In traditional Xhosa cosmology, these people are believed to live beneath the water with their crops and cattle, and such libations would result in a new strength and wisdom in human affairs.

It is easy to see why this is considered a sacred place. The water is a pure, deep green, and the banks are thickly forested with yellowwood trees and ancient cycads. Many birds, including the elusive Green-backed Heron, nest in the bordering reeds that sway and rustle in the wind. I have spent many solitary hours there listening to the song of the chorister robin in the golden light of a breaking dawn. Early morning is my favourite time, as it gives the best chance of seeing one of the shy creatures who live here — the Cape clawless otter. If one is lucky enough to find the crab shells that often mark an otter holt and has the patience to sit very quietly, one can catch glimpses of these playful and inquisitive creatures. I once watched a family of otters playing in the shallows. The three pups had small, squashed, brown faces and chased each other through the reeds, diving and popping up intermittently to look at the strange human figure.

Silence and solitude in the twilight hours have also been rewarded by glimpses of the favoured pets of the ancient Egyptians — the Greater spotted genet. One evening I watched one move soundlessly through the trees and could clearly see the white tear marks on its sharp, pointed, boldly patterned face and the long, striped tail contrasting with the leopard-like spots on its body. The Xhosa call this beautiful creature ‘mbodla’, which was the image that Mhala, son of the great Xhosa warrior Ndlambe, used to describe himself: ‘I am the wildcat (imbodla), a thing that walks by night.’ As the night fell and the sky darkened, I heard the croak of a tree hyrax spiralling into a bloodcurdling scream, and the strange, wild bark of the bushbuck. But I was also aware of the sounds of the motor cars on the main road to East London, a few kilometres away.

This book is aimed at those people driving at speed through the landscape, totally unaware of ‘nature’ and the creatures with whom we share this small blue planet. The book tries to convey something of the joy, as well as the emotional and spiritual benefits, of contact with ‘wild nature’. But this is only a part of the story.

J. M. Coetzee writes that ‘in the ecological vision, the salmon and the river weeds and the water insects interact in a great complex dance with the earth and the weather’ (Coetzee, 2003: 2). The crucial point that this book emphasises is that human beings are part of this ‘dance’ as well, though we are not always mindful of our partners.

OUR ALIENATION FROM NATURE

We have difficulty seeing our place in nature. There are a number of reasons for this, starting with the reality that what we understand by ‘nature’ is enormously varied. For increasing numbers of people, ‘nature’ means wilderness and wild animals, and is experienced very indirectly through magazines and television programmes. Even those who visit our national parks to see wild animals do so in a highly managed, ‘domesticated’ environment, enclosed in their cars and camp sites, separated from direct encounters with ‘wild nature’.

But the alienation of increasing numbers of people from the natural world is much deeper than this. ‘Nature’ does not only mean wild animals and wilderness areas. It is not something that exists outside of and independent of human action. We live in nature and interact with it every day in our actions of eating, drinking and breathing; we depend on nature for the materials and resources to meet our physical needs.

The act of eating illustrates both our direct relationship to nature and our ignorance of it, because we seldom know where the food we eat comes from. Most urban South Africans who consume meat in the form of beef, pork or chicken have never known an actual cow or pig or hen. This is because many urban people have absolutely no involvement in producing the food that sustains them. The complicated social processes involved in the production and distribution of that food is largely hidden from our immediate experience. And we anaesthetise our imaginations when we consume meat so that we don’t have to think about the actual creatures or their journey to the abattoir, or about the conditions of chickens in battery farms. Nor do most of us know whether we eat food whose production has involved taking a gene from one species and inserting it into another. Yet, a third of our yellow maize and soy bean crops in South Africa have been genetically modified. And in the same way that food is assumed to come from the supermarket, energy is thought to come from a switch or plug in the wall. No connection is made with the enormous (and polluting) coal-burning power stations, let alone with the peasants of Lesotho who are deprived of water so that people living in Johannesburg may benefit from the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme and rich people may enjoy their manicured golf courses.

Thoughtful people have suggested that this alienation from nature is the source of unjust social relations. Racism and sexism, for example, are said to reflect our relation to nature, in that ‘ignorance and hostility toward wild nature sets us up for objectifying and exploiting fellow humans’ (Snyder, 1995: 211).

There is a vicious cycle at work here. Appreciation of our place in nature depends on a level of awareness. As people living in cities and suburbs are removed from any personal, direct contact with wild nature, they are often unaware of our embeddedness in nature. They are apathetic towards the conservation of water or the protection of wild nature: the threatened extinction of the Blue swallow is not very meaningful to a child who has probably never even seen a Cape sparrow.

OUR INTERACTIONS WITH NATURE ARE HIDDEN

It is easy to ignore our place in nature. It is uncomfortable to recall that in South Africa we live in a water-scarce country and use up 12 litres of water every time we flush the toilet. It is even more uncomfortable to think about what happens to our bodily wastes, but sanitation is the most fundamental problem of high-density urban living. In many parts of South Africa, much pollution and illness, including typhoid and cholera, result from inadequate sanitation.

We can ‘lobotomise’ our brains to block any uncomfortable awareness about bodily wastes, or water consumption, or killing animals, because the abattoir is shrouded in secrecy and the sanitation pipes run unseen underground. The irony is that the processes involved in our daily interactions with nature are not only hidden; they are also social in the sense that they involve thousands of people and complex social organisations. The company that supplies water to the millions of citizens of Johannesburg employs large numbers of people, but most of us take for granted the water that flows from a tap. Only the thousands of mostly low-paid manual workers in the sector penetrate this invisibility, yet we are generally as unaware of them as we are of the processes by which water reaches our taps.

It is not only the sanitation pipes that run underground, below our conscious awareness. We think of trees as separate entities, but most of the world’s trees, in fact more than 90 per cent of the known plant species in the world, are not separate at all, but connected by a vast subterranean network of fungal filaments (Sacks, 2005: 55).

Many of the biological processes of nature are hidden, either from our senses or from our understanding. As the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Heraclitus wrote: ‘Nature likes to hide’ (cited in Halpern and Frank, 2001: ix). It operates in hidden, invisible ways, despite the microscope and the telescope, which create the modern ability to see and detect connections invisible to the naked eye. Many creatures, for example, use ultrasound, too high for humans to hear, to communicate, and even if we can hear the clicks of the fruit bat, we still don’t understand how these noises enable it to find its way around in total darkness, using sonar to measure the time interval between each click and its echo. We have only very recently come to understand how termites under attack from fungi send out an alarm signal, frantically waggling their heads to warn the rest of the colony to run away. Only in 1965 was a microscopic bacterium discovered in a pool in Yellowstone National Park, which eventually led to DNA fingerprinting technology. We need someone like Richard Dawkins to explain the process of natural selection, what he calls ‘the blind watchmaker’ — the gradual, blind, unconscious, automatic process that Darwin discovered and that we now know explains much of all life forms.

‘The environment in which people actually live is complex, unyielding of its secrets’ (Davis, 2002: 21). Many of the crucial processes in our daily interactions with nature are obscure. Most of us do not understand a forest’s ability to cool and filter water, and to humidify the air. At the same time, many of our deepest environmental concerns are about invisible agents and processes: carcinogens in the atmosphere, pathogens in the water, teratogens in the food. The greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that cause the phenomenon of global warming, which is altering our lives, are invisible. Many forms of environmental degradation involve imperceptible and incremental change such as the slow rate of global warming. Daily exposure to low levels of air pollution that cannot be seen or smelled ruins the health of millions of people. Most air pollution consists of five substances: sulphur oxides, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and particulate matter, which are all invisible to the naked eye, and some pollutants occur as particles, 50 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. The reality is that ‘pollution itself never shows up on death certificates ... [though] the diseases worsened by bad air are among the most common afflictions in the modern world: heart disease, cancer and asthma’ (Davis, 2002: 194).

We are often slow to react to much of this pollution, which is slow-working, hidden, undramatic and insidious. Pollution such as sulphur dioxide emissions sometimes provokes social reactions because it comes from visible single-point sources like coal-fired power stations and smelters, while other forms of air pollution, such as that from cars, are more invisible and dispersed, and so accepted. Studies show that in Delhi, for example, over 75 per cent of the air pollution is vehicular, coming from private and public transport (Martinez-Aller, 2002). Yet for many people, this pollution is socially invisible, as cars are indicators of social status rather than sources of emissions (and accidents) that threaten human health. Beck laments how this kind of ‘industrial pollution of the environment and the destruction of nature’ is characterised by what he calls ‘a loss of social thinking’ (Beck, 2005: 25).

Environmental risks from toxins and pollutants have to pass through a process of social recognition. Beck points out that a number of factors make this social recognition difficult. Firstly, the risks are ubiquitous in urban–industrial society. The risks are

‘piggy-back products’ which are inhaled or ingested with other things. They are the stowaways of normal consumption. They travel on the wind and in the water. They can be in anything and everything, and along with the absolute necessities of life — air to breathe, food, clothing, home furnishings — they pass through all the otherwise strictly controlled protective areas of modernity (Beck, 2005: 41).

Secondly, while in the past pollution and environmental hazards were perceptible to the senses, ‘many of the newer risks (nuclear or chemical contaminations, pollutants in foodstuffs, diseases of civilization) completely escape human powers of direct perception. The focus is more and more on hazards which are neither visible nor perceptible to the victims’ (Beck, 2005: 27). The nuclear threat is a particularly good illustration of this social invisibility, because radioactivity completely evades human perception. It is invisible, odourless and tasteless, and its effects do not always have an immediate impact on those they affect.

Thirdly, many of these threats are only detectable and explicable through the application of specialised forms of scientific knowledge. An example is the detection of traces of toxic metals in water. It is only by the application of sophisticated scientific knowledge and technology that these phenomena can be detected, and the connection with ill-health made.

Not only is this damage invisible to direct sensory experience and understanding, but it is sometimes deliberately concealed. Many corporate polluters, aided by uncaring or incompetent state bureaucracies, follow a pattern of deceit and denial to avoid responsibility. In addition, the relation between environment factors and public health is often obscured by reductionist science. Davis points out that ‘the traditional medical focus on individual diagnosis and treatment utterly fails to reveal the pattern individual cases of disease make when matched with environmental conditions’ (Davis, 2002: xvii). In addition, many victims of toxic waste, for example, suffer from ‘latency invisibility’, i.e. ‘the long, unknown period between contamination and disease’ as well as from ‘etiological invisibility’, i.e. ‘the difficulty of determining the causal pathway of disease’ (Brown and Mikkelsen, 1992: 58).

Policy change is usually contested and protracted. It took 50 years of finding unmistakably higher levels of sickness and early death among smokers for the relation between smoking and ill-health to be inscribed in public policies. The tobacco industry funded a successful, well-orchestrated and perfectly legal campaign to undermine any studies showing how dangerous tobacco really was. The car industry mounted a similar disinformation campaign on research that showed the devastating health impacts of lead in gasoline. The pesticide industry fought hard to silence Rachel Carson’s warnings that the use of DDT [Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane] was poisoning people as well as the planet. In his discussion of the ‘denial industry’, Monbiot has described how corporations such as ExxonMobil (one of the world’s most profitable corporations) are undermining popular understanding of a scientific consensus on climate change (Monbiot, 2006b).

So the real scientific difficulties have been complicated by a stream of disinformation fuelled by the short-term economic interests of those who stand to profit from keeping matters unresolved and obscure. Davis suggests that

we know less and less about more and more. The reasons have partly to do with the intricacies of the science, but also result from the skilful ways in which some in the corporate world have effectively blocked research, cancelled studies, pulled funding, and employed sophisticated public relations campaigns to cast doubt on these questions (Davis, 2002: 194).

But we need to study these processes to develop our awareness and appreciation of our everyday interactions with nature, because nature is currently in a crisis that threatens the survival of us all.

NATURE IN CRISIS

Ours is a time of intensified threats to all nature, not only the extinction of species, but the alteration of the climate and the degradation of landscapes. These threats are not ‘natural’ and inevitable. They are social in their causes and consequences in the sense that they are rooted in our behaviour, i.e. in damaging human action.

Through such action, about six million hectares of primary forest are felled each year and about a third of mangrove swamps have been lost since the 1980s. The capacity of ecosystems to perform valuable functions like filtering water, providing food and pollinating crops is being degraded by direct human actions like overfishing and through indirect ones like the production of carbon dioxide, the gas that is primarily responsible for global warming, and the tendency of deforestation to increase the risk of floods.

Climate change is expected to lead to increased disasters, rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies. It also threatens the survival of thousands of species — a threat unparalleled since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago. Scientists warn that there are declining numbers of plants, animals, insects and birds across the globe, and that the current extinction rate is up to a thousand times faster than in the past. About 844 animals and plants are known to have disappeared in the past 500 years. Many people living around the Arctic fear that their children will never know the polar bear, as thinning ice and longer summers are destroying its habitat. The forest habitat of the 650 mountain gorillas left in the world is under increasing threat from logging, as well as climate change. The ice cap is receding on Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro. The number of male green turtles is falling because of rising sea temperatures. The migratory patterns of many birds are being disrupted. In sum, scientists have warned that up to 37 per cent of terrestrial species could become extinct by 2050. The direct causes of biodiversity loss — habitat change, over-exploitation, the introduction of invasive species, nutrient loading and climate change — show no sign of abating.

These threats to biodiversity are very real in southern Africa. Climate change is likely to affect the area particularly severely by reducing rainfall and increasing desertification. There are few countries that can boast of three ‘biodiversity hotspots’, based on the diversity of plant species found there. In South Africa they are the Succulent Karoo, which contains the richest succulent flora in the world; Maputa-Pondoland, the second most plant-diverse system in Africa, containing 8 100 species; and the Cape Floral Region or Fynbos Region, which is recognised as one of the six plant kingdoms of the world, with 9 000 species. The last list of threatened plant species was completed in 1997 and contained 3 508 plants, of which 920 were listed as threatened with extinction and 42 were extinct. Under the impact of urbanisation, these numbers have increased dramatically, perhaps by as much as 30 per cent in the past 10 years. Our endangered mammals range from the black rhinoceros to the golden mole, with the list including 10 critically endangered species, 18 endangered species (including the African wild dog) and 29 that are considered vulnerable. Most tourism in South Africa is nature based and several species in the Kruger National Park, such as the sable and roan antelopes, could be threatened as temperatures rise, unless corridors are created to allow them to migrate to the more humid coastline. Of the 950 species of birds recorded as being from southern Africa, only 42 are currently listed as globally threatened, but 2 species, the Egyptian vulture and African skimmer, are already extinct. According to Environmental Affairs Minister Martinus van Schalkwyk, of South Africa’s terrestrial ecosystems, 34 per cent are threatened and 5 per cent critically endangered; of the country’s 120 major rivers, 82 per cent are threatened and 44 per cent critically endangered (cited in The Star, 2006d).

In South Africa, we have to confront not only climate change and the loss of biodiversity, but also air pollution, land degradation, water scarcity and pollution, as well as excessive waste generation and disposal. Most importantly, we are a significant contributor to global warming, as one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters. According to Richard Worthington of Earthlife Africa, South Africa accounts for about half of the carbon emissions on the African continent.¹ Government proposals to build 15 more coal-fired power stations to meet our electricity needs ignore this reality. Clearly, renewable energy is a cleaner alternative and points to how the environmental and social crises are linked. Social justice demands that the mass of our people should be given access to clean, safe energy. Environmental justice demands that this should take the form of renewable energy, with its potential to create employment and increased local participation in decentralised enterprises.

One report indicated that in many areas we are breathing air ten times more polluted than recommended by international standards, we are bombarded with potentially lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation strong enough to break down plastic, and ultraviolet-B radiation reached ‘extremely dangerous’ levels in the summer of 1998–99 (Sunday Times, 1999a). According to this report, air pollution in many industrial and residential suburbs within the country’s major metropolitan areas was more than double World Health Organization recommendations. Then there is the problem of landfills, as we produce millions of cubic metres of solid waste annually. Soil erosion is serious, with 11 per cent of our topsoil lost every year, and there is a widespread use of dangerous materials, such as asbestos.

The relation between asbestos and mesothelioma is now well-established, and epidemiologists warn that other forms of cancer are directly related to environmental pollution. The carcinogenic substance dioxin has been found in very high levels in the perfect food for babies, the breast milk of nursing mothers, at the top of the human food chain. Over 60 years ago, Rachel Carson warned that we were poisoning ourselves as well as the planet, and was herself a victim of the rising rates of breast cancer among women. Now testicular cancer among men in industrial countries is also rising. Carson promoted the view of nature as inclusive — as a ‘web of life’ that connects us all. Today that web of life is unravelling. As Wilson writes: ‘As the crisis has deepened, it has spread outward to encompass the entire planet and inward into our very bodies’ (Wilson, 1997: 73).

The environmental crisis is most dramatically evident in global warming, with its devastating pattern of chaotic weather and habitat change. It is estimated that one-third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100 (McCarthy, 2006). Those most affected are the marginalised peoples of the global South, particularly in Africa, where agricultural communities already struggle to cope with changing rainfall patterns and the increasing spread of diseases such as cholera and malaria, which will increase with rising temperatures.

Already the droughts in Ethiopia and different parts of Africa are causing massive hardship linked to the warming of the Indian Ocean. A sad irony is that it is the wealthy 10 per cent of the world’s population living in the global North who are most responsible for the pollution generating climate change. The motor car is a major source of pollution (as well as the cause of thousands of deaths and injuries), and at present there are 500 cars for every 1 000 people in the United States, as against 8 for every 1 000 in India (Elliot, 2006). Motor cars are a major source of carbon emissions, and the number of cars on South African roads is increasing dramatically. According to a recent report by the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa, new vehicle sales will top 700 000 by the end of 2006 (The Sunday Independent, 2006e). As with much of the environmental damage described in this book, that done by cars is hidden. As Sachs writes, ‘the power of the car excites the driver precisely because its prerequisites (pipelines, streets, assembly lines) and its consequences (noise, air pollution, greenhouse effect) remain far beyond the view from behind the windscreen’ (Sachs, 1999: 15).

While only the wealthy can afford the 4x4s that are so polluting, aviation represents the world’s fastest-growing source of the carbon dioxide emissions that lead to climate change, and it is only the wealthy who can afford to fly (Monbiot, 2006a). The ecological economist Richard Douthwaite points out that

the peaks in world oil and gas production are about to be reached and, without rationing, energy prices could go much higher, so that poor people will be unable to cook their food while the better off will still be using their air-conditioning and running big cars (cited in Ecocity Newsletter, 2005).

However, global warming is only one component of a much deeper and more extensive ecological crisis: ‘it is not about any given ecosystem damage such as global warming, species loss, resource depletion, or the widespread intoxication by new chemicals …. It is about the fact that these kinds of things are all happening together’ (Kovel, 2002: 20).

The ways in which the poor will suffer first and worst from climate change illustrate the connections between the crisis of nature and the crisis of justice. The crisis of nature refers to increasing environmental degradation. As Sachs writes, ‘if all countries followed the industrial example, five or six planets would be needed to serve as “sources” for the inputs and “sinks” for the waste of economic progress’ (Sachs, 1999: 75). The crisis of justice refers to increasing social inequality both within and between nations. At present, about 20 per cent of the world’s population consume almost 80 per cent of the world’s resources. It is the rich who consume disproportionate quantities of energy and water, and who produce the most waste. Their lifestyle cannot serve as the standard of justice or the goal of development. Because of resource constraints, we can no longer talk of development as economic growth. The poor are sometimes pushed into destructive activities such as cutting down trees for firewood, but the main culprits of deforestation are the multinational corporations. They are responsible for the destruction of ancient forests, the overfishing of our oceans and the pollution of air. Globalisation is being driven by these corporations, and many people are beginning to say that these corporations, in their drive for profit, are a major environmental threat. Some go further and indict capitalism, with its unrelenting pressure to expand in the search for profits and new markets, as inherently ecodestructive. For example, Kovel terms capitalism a ‘suicidal regime’ (Kovel, 2002: 6).

This global pattern of deprivation and over-consumption is clear in post-apartheid South Africa, now one of the most unequal societies in the world. Almost half of all households live below the estimated poverty datum line. At the same time, the chief executives (mainly white men) of South Africa’s 50 largest and most influential companies are each being paid on average more than ZAR 15 million a year. They make more than 700 times the minimum wage (Crotty and Bonorchis, 2006), and are part of what Canadian political scientist John Saul calls a ‘dominant, transnational capitalist class’ that is surrounded by ‘vast outer circles of less privileged people’ (Saul, 2006: 22).

The notion of sustainable development was supposed to address these two crises — the crisis of nature (whereby we have reached the limits of nature as a source and as a sink) and the crisis of justice (increasing social exclusion and inequality). But the crucial point is that ‘nature’ does not exist outside and totally independent of us. Many environmental disasters are blamed on ‘natural phenomenona’, like El Niño, as a means of downplaying human complicity in such events. But many such disasters are not external events visited upon people by nature, but emerge from natural and social interaction. The damage caused by flooding, for instance, often involves human actions, such as planning regulations being either too lax or ignored, so that building takes place in areas that are liable to flood. References to ‘natural causes’ like the weather presuppose a purified, abstract view of nature and society. There have been many environmental disasters provoked directly by human actions, such as the deadly gas leak from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands and left many more blinded and permanently disabled. References to ‘natural disasters’ often obscure the real causes in human action that contribute to the scale of destruction. For example, the 2005 earthquake that struck Kashmir, killing 73 000 in Pakistan and 1 400 in India, exposed shoddy construction standards in homes and schools. In the December 2004 Asian earthquake and tsunami, which killed huge numbers of people, the toll was amplified by coastal development that destroyed protective vegetation. This was especially true in Thailand, where hotel complexes were built right on the beach directly in the path of the tsunami, while the mangroves and coral reefs that would have dampened much of its impact had been destroyed. Similarly, the case of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which left a thousand dead, exposed how New Orleans, a delta city built below flood level, once had coastal wetlands that would have been a buffer against storm surge, but they had been destroyed by so-called ‘developers’. These were natural events whose impacts were magnified by human action. As the Washington-based environmental group the Worldwatch Institute said at the time, ‘indiscriminate economic development and ecologically destructive policies have left many communities more vulnerable to disasters than they realise’ (cited in The Herald, 2005).

RESPONDING TO CRISIS

As the crisis of nature deepens, there are many different calls for change. While Kovel argues for eco-socialism if we are to survive, other are urging us to reduce consumption; to repair, recycle and reuse; and to ‘live simply so that others may simply live’ as Schumacher expresses it (Schumacher, 1963: 12). The German social theorist and activist Wolfgang Sachs argues that calls for poverty eradication have to be accompanied by demands for ‘wealth alleviation’. He writes: ‘There will be no equity unless the corporation-driven consumer classes in North and South become capable of living well at drastically reduced levels of resource demand’ (Sachs et al., 2002: 37).

But change is difficult. The United States of America is responsible for 24 per cent of total carbon emissions, so I watched Al Gore’s award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth in that hotbed of conspicuous consumption, the Hamptons, with interest. I was delighted by its impact on the audience, but depressed by how little my hosts changed their behaviour. Their addiction to air-conditioning and wastefulness in relation to ‘leftover’ food continued unchanged. But of course, I had flown to New York in the first place, which puts me in the same category of ‘carbon criminals’. Monbiot writes: ‘On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once a 90 per cent cut in emissions has been made’ (Monbiot, 2006b: 173). He concludes, ‘long distance travel, high speed and the curtailment of climate change are not compatible. If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives’ (Monbiot, 2006b: 188).

Nevertheless, change is essential. Monbiot has argued that people in rich nations (especially the United States, Canada and Australia) must reduce carbon emissions by 90 per cent by 2030 to contain global warming, before it reaches 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the point at which major ecosystems begin collapsing (Monbiot, 2006a). As McKibben points out, we have known that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels, for 20 years, but emissions have continued to soar. As he writes, the United States ‘uses more energy per capita than any other country’ (McKibben, 2007: 6).

The theologian Thomas Berry maintains that ‘the human community and the natural world will go into the future as a single sacred community or we will both perish in the desert’ (cited in Martin, 1993: 43). Creating such a single community has to begin with confronting our alienation from nature. This condition of alienation involves what the ethno-botanist Gary Nabham terms the ‘extinction of experience’ — a blunting of our capacity for joyful, mindful and responsible living. To overcome this ‘blunting’, he argues for direct and different contact with wild nature, for an ‘intimate involvement with plants and animals; direct exposure to a variety of wild animals carrying out their routine behaviors in natural habitats’ (Nabham, 1993: 73). This could be valuable, but the notion behind this strategy is of nature as something ‘out there’, and synonymous with the ‘wild’. Our relation with nature is much deeper and more intimate than this.

While exploring this intimacy, the American philosopher Henry Thoreau argued that we first have to learn how to live deliberately and mindfully. He advised us to ‘live each season as it passes, breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit and resign yourself to the influences of each’ (cited in Nabham, 2002: 35). But ‘tasting the fruit’ involves a level of awareness that many of us lack.

Readers should ask themselves when they last really looked at a piece of ordinary fruit like an apple. The American journalist Michael Pollan writes:

Slice an apple through at its equator and you will find five small chambers arrayed in a perfectly symmetrical starburst — a pentagram. Each of the chambers holds a seed (occasionally two) of such a deep lustrous brown they might have been oiled and polished by a woodworker (Pollan, 2001: 10).

Nature is full of such perfections, and allows for miracles such as the transformation of fruit into a substance that can change human consciousness — wine. There are many other such transformations, involving ‘raw nature’ combined with human effort and ingenuity, such as the transformation of wheat grains into bread or of the hard dark berries of the coffee tree into cappuccino. Independent of human interventions, wild nature contains many miraculous transformations, such as the egg that becomes a Crowned crane, the bee making honey in its thorax, the communication between trees and the architectural achievements of ants. Following Thoreau’s advice means escaping the mindless consumption of frozen, packaged foods available irrespective of the seasons. Much of the emphasis of the grassroots environmental activism described later in the book involves trying to overcome people’s alienation from nature by restoring their relations with their immediate environment — the land, water and food.

For this reason, Nabham decided to reduce the distance his food travels. His book, Coming Home to Eat (2002) describes his year-long commitment to eat only foods produced within a 250-mile radius of his home. For him, food should be treated as something sacred, an idea that connects to the rituals of ‘grace’ and the dietary restrictions that mark all religions. Nabham ended his year with a ‘sacred pilgrimage like a walking prayer — a prayer for what healthy food means — how it is wrapped up in most social and environmental justice issues’ (Nabham, 2002: 292). With friends and neighbours — all pilgrims for Just Food, Slow Food — he walked 240 miles in the Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Heritage and Health, a ‘multicultural pilgrimage fuelled by native foods and medicines, prayers and songs.’ They ended the walk with a bread-breaking ceremony using loaves of white, processed bread. ‘A white bread for white America ... symbolic of the dominant culture.’ They threw it on the ground and

leaped high, stomped and danced until we flattened those plastic-wrapped globs of doughy airbread into the ground. We had broken bread in an altogether unprecedented sense, by accepting no substitutions for true communion with one another and this sacred land (Nabham, 2002: 299).

The problem with this account is that for the half of South Africa’s population living in poverty who are part of half the world’s people living on less than two dollars a day, bread — especially white, processed bread — is a luxury. Social justice demands that we take account of the needs of people living in places like Orange Farm, housed in rudimentary tin shacks without access to water, electricity or sanitation. For all the 250 000 households who still have to rely on the hated ‘bucket system’, proper sanitation is an issue of both environmental and social justice. It is these people — the poor and the powerless — who are most affected by the abuse of nature. Justice involves changing the distribution of power, resources and opportunities in the world.

Our future depends on realigning the relation among power, justice and nature; on linking their needs and those of all the creatures with which we share this planet. When we acknowledge those needs, see and appreciate nature in our everyday lives — in encounters with the food we eat and how we grow and cook it, the water we drink and the air we breathe — we will be living more fully and mindfully. When we are aware of the hidden sanitation pipes, when we can see nature in commonplace objects like an apple or a glass of water, as easily as we now sometimes see it in wild places and creatures, we will have moved towards a better understanding of our place in the ‘great complex dance’ of all life. But this is only the starting point.