War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock
rel="nofollow" href="#u311fd099-c198-5364-a213-78f8610b45c3">Chapter 4: Imitating Nature describes relating to nature as a source of ideas about appropriate social relations and behaviour, as a model of social arrangements. It begins by describing the first gay rights march in South Africa, an event that some described as celebrating ‘unnatural’ behaviour. The gay rights struggle has emphasised how appeals to ‘nature’ or to ‘the natural’ are often made to legitimate a particular normative order; the claim is that patterns of social behaviour such as heterosexual sex, marriage, jealousy, competitiveness, social inequality and war, for example, are ‘natural’.
Chapter 5: Privatising Nature describes relating to nature as a source of profit and the struggles this generates. The process of turning natural resources into commodities to be bought and sold is happening around the world and is deepening both social and environmental injustice. The main culprits are the multinational corporations that have been termed ‘ecological destroyers’. The chapter is set in Orange Farm, a large informal settlement in South Africa, and uses this to introduce a discussion of privatising a ‘natural resource’ that is also a crucial human need, water. It is shown that the introduction of pre-paid water meters in Orange Farm has had devastating health and social impacts on poor households, who are organising through the Coalition Against Water Privatisation.
Chapter 6: Polluting Nature describes the cost of disregarding nature in the production process, what is sometimes called ‘externalising costs’. It begins by profiling Strike Matsepo, who has been involved in a struggle against South Africa’s largest steel manufacturer’s pollution of the groundwater in Steel Valley, the area around Vanderbijlpark. It describes the efforts of Matsepo and groupings such as the Steel Valley Crisis Committee and the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance to stop this pollution of nature and obtain compensation for the thousands of people who have lost their health and livelihoods. The chapter shows that in Steel Valley, as in the case of Love Canal in New York State (the scandal that acted as a catalyst to the American environmental movement), the pollution was neither cataclysmic nor dramatic. There was no sudden moment when the physical surroundings changed suddenly. The pollution of the groundwater from invisible chemicals was slow, insidious and often denied by state officials and even the residents themselves.
Chapter 7: Abusing Nature describes relations with nature that are grounded in the notion that nature exists for the benefit of humans, and that human beings are the source of all value and meaning in the world. As in the other chapters, it begins with a story as a spotlight, a way of focusing on a set of issues. It describes a visit to a ‘hidden abode’ of production, the abattoir, and discusses difficult questions raised by struggles for animal rights about our treatment of other animals and their intellectual and emotional capacities.
Chapter 8: Protecting Nature describes relations aimed at protecting nature as a store of biodiversity. It begins by describing the ruins of the fifteenth century settlement of Thulamela in the north of the Kruger National Park and reports on our efforts to protect wild nature in national parks and game reserves. We need such protected areas, but they promote the dangerous idea that nature is separate from civilisation and that people can put nature in a specific, bounded place and live outside of it. Travelling in an air-conditioned car through a national park provides a very tame and domesticated experience of wild nature: it is reduced to a purely visual experience emptied of any discomfort involving heat or dust or physical exertion or danger. Furthermore, up to four-fifths of South Africa’s biodiversity lies outside its protected areas. An important theme explored in this chapter is the social impact of conserving ‘wild nature’. Over a million people visit the Kruger National Park each year and some even feel reverential about the ruins at Thulamela, but ignore the living real-world people who are economically and politically marginalised around the edges of the park and who are struggling to obtain material benefits from conservation.
Chapter 9: Organising for Nature profiles individuals like Thabo Madihlaba, Bobby Peek and Mandla Mentoor, who describes himself as ‘organising for nature’. It reports on the efforts of increasing numbers of people who relate to nature as a site of struggle to achieve sustainable development or environmental justice. Based on interviews with various key environmentalists, this chapter records their very different understandings of nature, their routes into activism, and the different organisations and struggles with which they are involved.
Chapter 10: Rethinking Nature returns to the theme of nature as a site of struggle. It is suggested that at this time of deepening crisis in nature, it is well to remember Rachel Carson’s warnings about how we are poisoning the planet and ourselves. In her book Silent Spring she argued that the methods employed for insect control were such that ‘they will destroy us as well’. Since she wrote world pesticide production has increased dramatically. The reason has to do with issues that Carson neglected — issues such as power, justice, social inequality, globalisation and war. These are issues that may seem remote from a concern with nature, but are deeply implicated in the current crisis.
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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