What were we doing in KZN?

Laurence films Doug while Mbali checks a weir in Penny Park

Mbali and Doug look out across the Penny Park wetland
 form the ridge on the north side

Late Friday afternoon and I really just want to go home,  The building is quiet, the sun has set behind the mountain and there are just too many things swirling around in my head.  But on may schedule for the whole week has been a promise to get down a few words about my trip last week to KZN, exploring the next CareTakers film shoot.  On the itinerary were three sites, two for direct visits to look at the potential of the stories that represented, and a third a bridge just too far.   Actually we discovered another wetland that from the outset we knew would be just too far, the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, or Greater St Lucia,   The irony being that we have now decided that that is where we will go to get the footage which we need to complete "Making the Case for Biodiversity".   Instead we did a sort of deductive process, and ruled out the site that we did visit for that purpose.   As delightful, instructive and pleasing as it was as a model wetland restoration site, Penny Park just outside of Kokstad didn't quite have the oomph that we needed in profile to match the footage that we'd already captured at COP17 and the Living Beehive at Durban Botanic Gardens (see earlier posts).  We, Laurence and myself, were treated to a great drive around PennyPark by project implementer Doug Woods and the WfWet Provincial Coordinator, Mbali Goge, who showed us the amazing things that can be done to bring back gouged out wetlands from the bring of disaster, using judiciously placed concrete weirs while generating work opportunities in the local community.   I'm not going to get that all written up now,   We did get a bit of footage of Doug and Mbali explaining things, and hopefully next week I can cut that and get it posted to YouTube,   In the mean time I'll try to find a still to plonk in here.    The other two project which are up for attention some time in the future, after we've made the case, are projects within the SANBI Grasslands Programme,  The one closest to receiving film making attention is the Umgano project in which the local Mabandla community, under the leadership of iNkosi Baleni, and the conservation guidance of Dr Bill Bainbridge, are building a model of sustainable land use which combines traditional land use, commercial stockfarming, and commercial timber production along with extensive grasslands conservation.   But that's a story for next week.    I think I just really needed to say that there is some wonderfully positive conservation work going on that is confronting the challenges faced by South Africa as it still struggles to find its liberated feed in a changing world that will have to be governed by a green economy.

iNkosi Baleni and Bill Bainbridge pause for a pic outside the iNkosi's office and meeting room

Nine months and not counting

 Late on a Friday afternoon, and the pre-retirement reflective mode has kicked in.  Resolved not to walk away from this office in less than 9 months time leaving piles of things committed to the garbage without inspection, I've started going through the boxes of slides and photographs that have been gathering dust since the digital camera was invented.   It's interesting that the images I find here don't quite match up in sharpness and resolution to those produced by my Canon G10, but they're certainly a whole bunch better than those of the middle era, when digital was new and cool and 250kb images would painlessly record history for evermore.  I still have to confront that part of the collection.    But what these ones, a couple of which I've inserted here, may lack in quality, they certainly make up for in layered memories.

Top, the  team of the Stress Ecology Research Programme, stationed at University of Cape Town (ca 1993) just prior to moving into the newly built Kirstenbosch Research Centre (see image in previous post for what it looks like now).  And the team? Back (l-r): Mike O'Callaghan; Mario Fritz, Stephanie Wand, Stanley Snyders, Charles Musil;  Middle: Guy Midgley, Mike Rutherford (team skipper), Debbie Hunter, Timm Hoffman; Front: Deryck de Witt, George Davis.   The three old codgers in that team are Charles, Mike and myself, and we all retire this year, 2012, the year of the Dragon!       Picture two (taken about 7 or 8 years earlier) shows that we made it out into the field sometimes, and that some of the team actually put their backs into it.  I thank Deryck (left) and De Wet Bosenberg (right) for substantial help with the soil pit at the Highlands research site,  I'm not sure how much of the physical labour was done by either Andrew Flynn (centre; where is he now?) or myself (behind camera).

A field trip that I remember well was an exploratory one to Namaqualand in about 1995, where Timm Hoffman set up a project that remains active to this day.  His subsequent work has been hugely influential in the way we now think about the role that botany, ecology and gritty determination play in rural development and the basis for a green economy.   In the bottom image,  Timm takes a photo of a fenceline contrast between communal and privately owned rangeland.

In these next 9 months I'll probably find many more photographs and memories about my 28 years in SANBI (ex-NBI (ex-BRI)) which I'll want to share with no-one in particular, but at least this blog is somewhere that I can think this stuff through without cluttering up my desk with scraps of paper and piles of unsortable photos.       Cheers.  G