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ELEVEN seconds. That’s how long the footage on Youtube was, showing a whole building tumble face-down into a raging river of mud – yet nothing brought home the power of the recent mudslides in Sierra Leone like those few seconds. Four hundred people dead so far; with 600 or so still missing, the dead toll is bound to be huge.
Deforestation bears much of the blame for this tragedy. Trees anchor soil with their own roots, and the complex, deep layer of mingled bacteria and fungi that interact with the roots. When they are felled and the roots die, so does this mooring layer, and the inorganic matter, the dirt, is primed to become a landslide or mudslide.
On the island of Sumatra, indigenous forest is also being destroyed to make way for commercial exploitation in the form of palm plantations, with similar consequences. When he visited the island, Philip Lymbery, author of the recent Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were (Bloomsbury) was told by ‘Mr Prakoso’, a defender of the forest, that floods had recently destroyed two nearby homes thanks to deforestation.
“The forest is a water catchment area and we have to protect that,” he told Lymbery, who notes that “as well as holding soil in place and controlling landslides, [indigenous forest trees] play a vital role in preventing flooding.”
Environmental organisations campaigns against palm oil plantations are usually headlined by charismatic threatened species like the orangutan (there are enough species under threat from the spreading plantations, and to spare; Lymbery outlines the threat of deforestation to the thinning population of Sumatran elephant, down to its last 2 500).
But like other human activities, deforestation destroys even more basic precious assets, ones that cannot easily be rehabilitated, for short-term commercial gain: the quality of water, soil and air.
The impact of the palm plantations reaches far afield, Lymbery explains – and sometimes takes strange turns. The palm fruit kernel, a byproduct of the oil industry, is imported by the European Union, South Korea, the UK, China and New Zealand – to feed cattle.
And subtly alter our diets, as New Zealanders discovered when Jocelyne Benatar, senior research doctor at the cardiovascular research unit of Auckland City Hospital, found that PKE (palm kernel expeller, cheap food for dairy herds) is “linked to changes in the composition of milkfat” (big NZ dairy producer Peter Cullinane believes it also alters butter’s taste, and says dairy cows should be eating what they’ve evolved to eat: grass).
The web of life that cradles us is very, very complex. We mess with it at our peril. Britain’s enthusiastic use of chemicals in industrial scale farming has caused steep declines in wild bee and bumblebee populations, Lymbery learned from bee expert Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at Sussex University; they are even more important as pollinators than familiar honey-bees, so there’s a knock-on impact on food security: “Even a tin of baked beans contains beans pollinated by bees in a sauce pollinated by bees too,” writes Lymbery.
Change any part of an ecosystem, organic or inorganic, and you could be triggering trouble that you can’t foresee. Something said by our Minister of Mineral Resources early last year (yes, he who has just been charged with treason by OUTA) has been disinterred online recently: we have “50-trillion worth of mineral resources which remain untapped beneath the soil” that, if liberated, would turn each South African into an instant millionaire. Yes, Minister, but what would be the cost of tapping them be, to something as basic as food?
Some relevant research has been done on coal, in the Mpumalanga area, where 46.4 % of South Africa’s total high potential arable soils is found.
If government decided that coal was more important than food, “…around 240 000 ha of high potential land will be lost to maize farming in Mpumalanga, implying a loss of 1,2 million tons of maize to the South African market. This is enough to permanently change South Africa into a maize importing country,” writes Victor Munnik.
Soil is a complex, living thing. It’s just not possible to quickly rehabilitate it to the state it was in before mining (or deforestation) took place, even using best practice.
Changes in mining legislation a few years back gave the mineral resources department control over policing environmental issues, when they’re linked to mining. Do you have faith that this powerful department gets the value of food, the value of conserving fertile soil (and the water catchment in this area), rather than the short-term goal of mining-licence favours to hand out and some jobs?
Do you believe the top echelon of government sees how crucial it is to preserve the precious ecosystems that underpin our food security? Do you believe that they fully grasp the danger of masses of hungry people (we’ve over seven million in desperate straits, according to Stats SA) especially if they’re living in devastated environments where they can no longer even subsistence farm?
I don’t. Not based on what we’ve seen in recent years.
So this is something we must fight for, as citizens, businesspeople, civil society. We must demand that any state decision that interferes with ecosystems – mining licences, permits for development and the like – be filtered through three questions first: what does this mean for our water… our air… and our soil?
* Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
