What is the W Cape doing for our planet?

OPEN letter to the mayor and the premier:

As we witness and experience the rapid closing in of harsh climatic change, the recognition must dawn on all public representatives that we have been doing too little and leaving it too late to halt its unrelenting advance. Last week, numerous British newspapers reported that former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a paper that gives governments of the world just three years to lower emission or face “runaway irreversible climate change”.

The cosmologist and physicist of our time, Stephen Hawking, believes we have lost the plot. The only solution, as he sees it, is for all of humanity to start contemplating abandoning our planet and migrating, lock stock and barrel, to another planet within a time span of 100 years.

Many chief ministers in India, however, are fully seized with the issue in a most admirable way. Last year, the state of Uttar Pradesh earned itself a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for planting 50 million saplings within eight hours. A year later, chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh is reported to have motivated 1.5 million people to plant 66 million saplings in just 12 hours in the Narmada River basin area. Dare I ask, what is our effort in the Western Cape and Cape Town looking like?

In our last meeting, I urged the executive mayor to embark on a programme of restoring the Cape’s massive yellowwood forests of yore. Everyone should take up the issue out of an intense commitment to inter-generational justice.

My question to the premier and to the executive mayor is whether they will do what their counterparts are doing to save the planet and to begin a comparable 12-hour campaign to plant 50 million or so saplings if they can be found in our nurseries? If that is not possible, what about at least 1 million saplings of indigenous trees such as the yellowwood? DENNIS BLOEM Cope