Chitchat

Straight talk about overpopulation and water piracy

Fewer children, more water While the current water crisis affects us all in different ways and the wonderful gentlemen Donovan Kirkwood and Walter Fieuw provided some valuable insight in “Let’s not waste the water crisis” in the Autumn 2018 issue of Platteland, there are some worldly habits nobody wants to talk about.

The most pressing issue is overpopulation. Cape Town has millions more souls to house, employ and provide sanitation for. Same thing right across the world. Please, let’s start opening the discussion with regard to greater contraception, fewer births and lowered consumption. This is the main key to slowing down and stopping the world’s total self-destruction. Make this a dinner-time conversation point.

Insist that all leaders understand that, by not addressing birth control, they will condemn our children and theirs to a damaged or destroyed world. Political, educational and especially religious leaders have so much power, and their silence is tantamount to a crime perpetuated against future generations. The gains made by the “greens” of the world are insignificant when set against nearly 8 billion people flushing our drinking water away. Please encourage smaller, educated families. One child is best, two maximum.

The virtually destroyed and seriously overloaded sewage treatment systems are the country’s worst water pollutants, and in effect the current government is our water’s worst enemy. Municipalities in so many smaller towns just don’t care and raw sewerage flows directly into rivers. Towns in the Eastern Free State pollute the Wilge and Vaal; Johannesburg feeds sewerage directly into Hartbeespoort Dam. The list is endless. Allowing untreated raw sewerage into our rivers is equal to a crime against humanity.

Encourage the non-existent planning of RDP housing estates to take a leaf from England’s Victorian terrace estates: build closer together and higher, and face the sun. Let’s not waste our wonderful natural warmth and light. Every third semidetached house already has two walls, only requiring a roof to make a third home.

If we personally do nothing more in our own lives, let’s at least work towards fewer thirsty, starving children. We simply have to stop hiding behind the taboo subject of birth control.

Bruce Nel, ROSEDALE FARM,

VAN REENEN’S PASS

With the help of a farmworker and an old Fiat tractor, Bruce built Ring of Rocks, a “sort of Stonehenge”, on the family smallholding at the top of Van Reenen’s Pass, 30km from Harrismith. They pegged out the equinox and solstices, as well as sunrise...