Ode to enviro week, Scifest, green hope and a little black bird
“Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.” Dalai Lama.
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Woody Allen.
Ode to enviro week, Scifest, green hope and a little black bird
“Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.” Dalai Lama.
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Woody Allen.
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” George Bernard Shaw.
I killed a bird today – by accident. Driving home, composing a piece for this Makana Enviro-News in my head, bemoaning the state of our planet – which people have created; the pollution, the warming, the habitat loss, the extinctions, the poaching, the mining, the drilling… Cursing my fellow human beings for being so mindless – and I killed a bird. It was on the side of the road, I was speeding, it got startled by my approach and flew in the wrong direction and I hit it – a beautiful little black bird!
So I came home and swore at myself for a while, grieved, regretted being in my head while driving, felt like a fool for viewing humanity with contempt for the ecological calamity it had created, while seconds later destroying life – just like we all have directly and indirectly – and then I put it all on paper.
But what's the point? If there’s one thing I learnt this year during an amazing Rhodes University Environmental Week and yet another superb Scifest Africa – where knowledge was shared so generously in both – it is that never has life on our planet, as we know it, been in more trouble. And that never have we known as much about what it will take to fix it as we do now. And while the human species has purposefully and inadvertently messed things up extremely, it has simultaneously achieved an unprecedented understanding of the ecology and cosmology we occupy.
So since each of us is going to die anyway, our only contribution to some semblance of immortality in this world is sharing crucial know-how and bringing about an irrevocable shift in our mindset and behaviour. We need to realise that we are of the Earth and know enough about it to, as Gandhi said, “Become the change we want to see in the world.” That’s why going green matters. Because regardless of who and what lives and dies individually, all life must go on, and in the vein of George Bernard Shaw, be simultaneously funny and tragic and beautiful and tough and sad and mesmerisingly magnificent!
Fun at the Green Fund Run
It felt like a cool combination of the Comrades and a carnival; the culmination of an amazing Rhodes University Environmental Week, organised by the Student Representative Council, and the end of Scifest, running almost concurrently with their vast array of events and lectures. The run saw Grahamstonians young and old come together in the late Sunday afternoon to raise funds and awareness for Rhodes University's Green Fund, which supports initiatives that promote sustainability at Rhodes and the town as a whole.
The fund’s aim is to turn all of Grahamstown into a South African sustainable living benchmark, and it was a Green [Fun]d Run in more ways than one! Many participants wore awesome costumes promoting messages of sustainability, while others took the run more seriously and dressed for racing success.
Each participant was also given a spekboom truncheon to plant at home; an indigenous Eastern Cape succulent that gobbles up carbon at an amazing rate. A wonderful event indeed!
And congratulations to the RU Environmental Committee and its team of volunteers who organised it, the Formula 21 team that achieved its hat-trick – winning the race for the third time in a row since its inception, Jameson House for winning the best-dressed prize, the countless residents that came out in droves to take part, the plethora of Rhodes personnel that participated, the SRC and various enviro student reps, and the scores of halls and students, who overcame the fatigue and greenery of Saturday’s St Paddy’s Day festivities to take part in record numbers. It was awesome to see all of Grahamstown unite! And yes, for two fabulous hours, the spirit of immortality of life on Earth was achieved and beautifully promoted in Grahamstown, by all of us … together!
Bots, hair and birds
Okay, my final ‘bird call’ – call it trying to make amends. Small birds at the Botanical Gardens like ‘white-eyes’ and ‘waggies’ are being found entangled in threads, traumatised, injured and dying. For now there haven’t been many, but in all cases these threads are of human origin – mostly like hair extensions. So while it’s cool to chill at Bots and braid, it’s not cool to leave discarded hair braids and threads behind. Please put them in a packet and discard them at home.
So there endeth the sermon. My guilt may take a little more time, but my hope remains immortal.
Contacts for Makana Enviro-News:
Nikki Köhly: n.kohly@ru.ac.za, 046 603 7205 / Jenny Gon: j-gon@intekom.co.za, 046 622 5822 / Nick Hamer: n.hamer@ru.ac.za, 084 722 3458 / Nick James: nickjames@intekom.co.za, 046 622 5757 / Lawrence Sisitka: heilaw@imaginet.co.za, 046 622 8595 / Strato Copteros strato@iafrica.com, 082 785 6403.
