ON THE WATER
Neither SA nor the rest of the world need to be saved
It is not too great a stretch of the imagination to correlate the Save SA campaign with any of the many campaigns to save the world, chiefly in that neither entity is in need of saving, yet do-gooders everywhere feel compelled to do so. Clearly, in SA we have a house on fire and everyone has to bloody well pitch in if we are to have a roof over our heads come sunrise, so to stretch a metaphor. As for the planet, it can no longer be denied that the loss of biodiversity, the disruption of the nitrogen cycle and climate change have to be reversed if human life is to be worth living. But to suggest that heroics — globally and domestically – will solve our problems would be a mistake. It is the kind of mistake we cannot afford. Even if a critical mass of decision makers came to accept that carbon is the devil’s very own dandruff, the conditions that permitted humanity’s excesses will prevail. Even if we were taxed, legislated and shamed into abandoning the combustion of carbon to produce...
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