Durban - Early this month there was a noise out on the patio late in the night, and I peered out. A dark shape moved across, smoothly. I reached for my camera and quietly opened the door. It stopped to rest and when I took the photo, it was not too disturbed by the flash. It was an African Large-Spotted Genet, often mistaken for a kind of cat, but more closely related to mongooses. It has adapted well to urban life, but most human residents are unaware of its existence.
Two days later the alarm calls of birds alerted us to a movement in the garden – this time, of a Slender Mongoose, another of the mammals of the area. Unlike the Banded Mongooses that scamper across the roads of the area at night in long troops, it is a solitary animal.
One day two of us were working in a thorny thicket taking out invasive plants when a different mongoose arrived and peered curiously at us – this was my first encounter with a Water Mongoose.
In damp nights I hear the strange foghorn call of the rarely-seen Buff-Spotted Flufftails from Glenwood’s Pigeon Valley, across the road. In winter the endangered Spotted Ground-Thrush comes to the park; one spent three weeks feeding confidently in my garden.
This little reserve has about 100 locally indigenous tree species; the whole of the British Isles has 33. And there is no other place in the world that has this particular combination of flora, with two of South Africa’s rarest trees present in large numbers. There are maybe 60 butterfly species and possibly 150 bird species that at some time are present. All this life just 4km from the city centre.
The assumptions we tend to make about life are, I think, damaging. We set up forms of exclusions in our minds; because reserves host “wildlife”, they does not belong in cities. A stream flowing in the Drakensberg is “nature”; water flowing in the city belongs in a drain.
Yet we are just one, very complex, form of life, in an endless chain of complex forms of life everywhere on the planet. Other forms of life will always flow around us, even through us. We now know that our bodies carry immense colonies of bacteria that are necessary for our health, and some of the viruses in our body play a role in protecting us.
Humans developed over long periods surrounded by this immense complexity. Studies show that people are happier when they spend time in places where we experience many diverse forms of life. Our spiritual life is damaged when we trick ourselves into believing that we can save ourselves and stamp our primacy on the rest.
Gandhi valued all life in its complexity; this reverence brings together ecology and nonviolence. His views challenged completely the modernist narrative of progress; it was once no doubt seen as backward-looking. But since then science increasingly has moved from a simplistic, mechanical view of life to revealing the magical interconnections that link us to all life.
“Development” though still tends to take the imperative of consumption, measuring success by money. So the great technical abilities of our society are not directed at addressing human inequality and ecological degradation.
We can produce great quantities of food, but not good nutrition. Our own waste now poisons ourselves and other life. Reverence for life shrinks to sentimental attachment to the more appealing animals, not to preservation of the habitat that is Earth. Yet life will be around us in cities; we constantly intervene in it. If we do so without thought we promote the explosive growth of a few species at the expense of the rest. For bird life, we end up with a few alien species like mynahs and house sparrows. Our gardens seldom connect with the grandeur of our indigenous heritage.
The alternative is for human intervention to enable diversity. Someone ignorantly brought the mauve-flowered creeper Ipomoea indica into South Africa. It smothers vegetation in much of Durban, denying food to the insects that feed on the indigenous plants. Its removal is essential to protect the biodiversity of areas like Pigeon Valley.
We need a similar approach to plans for Durban Bay, once one of the world’s most striking examples of biodiversity. Unchecked, “development” could reduce its life to algae and foul-smelling bacteria. There are other possibilities, though; restoring the ecological health of the rivers that flow into the bay is a key element, while planning for the spread of mangroves is essential.
Increasingly, we have the scientific capacity for understanding how to reconcile economic needs with the imperatives of making this a place welcoming to birds and aquatic life. The time to involve people with an understanding of our ecological systems is now, before plans have become, literally, set in concrete. - The Mercury
l Hemson is the director of the International Centre for Nonviolence, based at the Durban University of Technology, and is also with the Wildlife and Environmental Society of South Africa.