Some are saving the world; then there are the rest of us
Environmentalists come in two types. Type One will heave its faux off-roader onto the sidewalk of a street café where an appropriate bumper sticker will advertise shades of green to competing greenies, there hierarchically seated in proximity to the bottled-water dispensing bar and declare: “I am here to save the world.”
For all the binary implications thus implied, Type One is the only one that matters. Type Two is nothing but a function of the first; it would not exist other than as antithesis; on its own it is a zero in the process of dialectical reasoning. Were it not for those who would save the world, the world would have nothing from which it needed saving, but since it had invented itself, the defining characteristic for the rest of humanity became that of those who would ruin the world, just because Type One chose to save it.
It is exasperating. Take the WWF’s shameless deployment of its panda bumper sticker, which forces Type Two to associate panda bears with the WWF’s admirable ambition to “stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature”. Anyone in Type Two with a good hat and a snakebite kit could tolerate such a thing, unless they argue to let the pandas go extinct, in which case they would be vilified for expediting Armageddon.
That is how racism works and how SA’s trout wars are shaping up. Type One has claimed the moral high ground and staked out the battlefield as saving species. And anyone who is not with them is necessarily against saving the world and several SA fishes on the Red Data list.
Trout, which must have eaten several of its prey into extirpation since its introduction in the 1890s, are now established in high-lying areas.
This is where it gets weird. Type One’s argument is that trout are alien and invasive and that they therefore constitute a threat to autochthonous species.
This approach is not universal. In Europe, for instance, rainbow trout — which are originally from Pacific North America — are considered alien but not invasive, although several ecological risks — greater than those in SA — are associated with their occurrence.
The question Type Ones in the department of environmental affairs should ask is, at what point in the history of an introduced species does it graduate from being alien to autochthonous? Ask, for instance, whether dingoes introduced to Australia about 3,500 years are indigenous.
The book to read about this is by Duncan Brown, Are Trout South African?
The next question is whether, alien or otherwise, trout in SA are invasive. They certainly were alien in the 1890s and they invaded the country by being released by humans into cold-water streams and dams. They colonised the areas they could, did untold damage to local ecologies and settled down as apex predators, much like the people who brought them to SA in the first place. But now they have nowhere else to invade.
Type Two environmentalists prefer a more practical definition: a species is invasive only if its distribution threatens the biodiversity of an ecosystem. The keyword here is biodiversity, not species.
Nowhere in SA can it be shown that trout threaten biodiversity. Instead, it can be argued that trout and its value chain (about R1bn) have performed an ecological service by attaching a direct and substantial economic value to clean water and sustainable aquaculture. It is a good thing therefore that the country’s primary environmental law, the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act, acknowledges this, even if those charged with its execution appear not to.
The act also recognises that no-one can save the world, not even Type One. The world doesn’t need saving, humanity does. It is Type One’s mechanistic dialectic that divides humans into us and them, and its arrogance that has brought our species in conflict with the natural environment in the first place. Humans do not run the ecology, they’re part of it, no more and no less.