Tuesday, June 14, 2011

In Namaqualand with Conservation South Africa (4): A quick retrospective at Leliefontein and then down to the Coast

This posting  is just a place saver for the video material that I still need to edit from the trip with CSA.
I have some material from an earlier visit to Leliefontein, which is an interview with Bertus Meisenheimer and Henry Engelbrecht about the CSA's project Biodiversity and Red Meat Initiative (BRI).  This project looks to local smallstock farmers and asks them to engage with the very real, and very difficult problem that they face in coming to terms with the fact that stock numbers are negatively affecting the landscape, with overgrazing leading to degradation of vegetation, erosion, and impact son water resources.   There is no easy answer.  That is a short piece that I want to include for Leliefontein before we get into the car and travel down to Port Nolloth where we visit two further Skeppies projects.   (I will need to explain this thing about Skeppies, probably simply as a hyperlink to that funding structure that allows resources to flow to the kinds of projects covered by this series of video clips).   At Port Nolloth we meet with two young female volunteers who oversee the Port Nolloth Bird Park, which is a restoration project that is has reclaimed the estuarine habitat from neglect and degradation, and established a potentially important resource for local recreation and education.    The second project is a much more hardcore economic initiative, involving the harvesting of kelp from the beaches adjacent to Port Nolloth.  Harvested kelp is dried, shredded and packed,  and then sold into the market as fertilizer.   Living off the edge of the land.  Malinda Gardiner again narrates us through these two projects at the sea.    

I hope to have these clips posted in the next week or two.  Life has just got a bit too busy right now to try to fit them in.

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