Race against Clairwood destruction

THE towering trees, shrubs, grasses and wetland in the Clairwood Turf Club offered an awe-inspiring welcome to people coming into and going out of Merebank and Wentworth on a daily basis for decades.

Over the last month, Capital Property Fund, with its dastardly hand transformed the former glory of Clairwood Turf Club into a wasteland of denuded trees and a ghostly outlook.

Clairwood Turf Club was a beacon of hope for people of Merebank in particular and South Durban residents in general against the pollution from the sea of industries in its midst.

Clairwood Turf Club offered more hope to locals in terms of its sense of place and community spirit than a financial win at Tattersalls.

The former oasis of horses, trees and people, is now a sore sight of savagely chopped trees, stripped buildings and barren field all in the process of its acquisition for a logistics and distribution park development. The rot will not stop here. This, despite the environmental impact assessment process having been concluded, which is more a politically-endorsed rubber stamp for capital intensive development than a process to create a social and environmental compact and a quality of life as enshrined in our constitution.

This once glorious abode of trees, a buffer against pollution and unsightly industrial development, a sanctuary for people to seek refuge if there was a major industrial eruption, now will only bring the onslaught of development a step closer to our living space: pollution, vehicular emissions, a dust bowl, trucks, breakdowns, accidents, traffic jams, noise, vagrancy, prostitution, unemployment and social decay.

A daily drive along Solomon Mahlangu Road (Edwin Swales) gives a good example of how trucks servicing at similar logistical parks bring in their wake dust storms, reduced visibility and a zone prone to accidents, fires and disasters. All this will be closer to home in Merebank.

It could have been a different outcome if locals were treated as citizens with environmental and human rights, instead of pawns in the process of development.

It could have been a win-win outcome if there were councilled participatory plans about the future of South Durban in light of the Durban dig-out port and its myriad logistics parks and intensively truck-traversed roads.

Only a strategically mapped-out plan which is born out of a participatory decisionmaking process will offer us hope of ecologically sound and socially friendly development.

Rather than allow misguided development to create a social and environmental disaster, this is a call to our leaders to act now. CONCERNED SOUTH DURBAN CITIZEN

Via e-mail