A Wider Angle: This earth is all we have

WE were talking generally about threats to the environment.

Then my colleague suddenly came up with this comment: ‘You ever thought of Earth being a space station with no shuttles leaving from here?’

Of course, we knew what he meant. This planet is all we have and somehow people seem to forget that.

Development, human population growth, greed and increasing levels of consumption are growing beyond the capacity of the world’s natural resources to sustain themselves.

But friends, I must tell you I am no pessimist.

Don’t ignore people’s instincts and their capacity to understand what is happening around them.

We might be overwhelmed by the bad things we read and watch but who, for example, would have imagined the Zululand Taxi Association, which commands some 800 taxi owners and altogether 11 Taxi Associations, launching a Rhino Poaching Sticker Campaign?

Yes, the Vryheid Taxi Rank held a ceremony two weeks ago where they agreed to place such stickers on 2 000 of their taxis and thereby voice their strong opposition to the slaughter of our rhinos.

It was such a special gesture that our MEC for Social Development, Weziwe Thusi took time out to inaugurate the event.

Her speech was impassioned and important.

She spoke of her sense of ‘absolute joy’ at the taxi industry taking this initiative.

But she also spoke of the battle all of us are facing: ‘… a very different one, a battle that goes to the heart of what is ours, what makes our country different from all others. And what criminals are trying very hard – and very brutally – to take away from us’.

Thusi said people who dismiss or place little value on the plight of the rhino were guilty of not seeing the bigger picture.

‘It is the same as those people who turn on a tap and don’t care where the water comes from; so long as it is there.’

She kept returning in her speech to the ‘bigger picture’, how one thing relates to the next: ‘The rhino symbolises for me the health of our wild lands.

‘If people can poach rhinos and wild animals without a care in the world, they are effectively saying they don’t give a thought for the natural landscape that supports these animals; the trees, the soils, plants and grasslands that contribute to providing us with clean water, fresh air, fuel and food.’

She could very well have been saying what I started out with here. Earth is all we have. There’s no place else to go.

These lands represent all that is good for our future on this planet.

I believe the Zululand taxi industry has brought a surprising, collective human conscience to this rhino war. It is a valiant gesture.