Scorched

BOOKS by Leonie Joubert

Scorched: South Africa’s changing climate (Wits University Press, 2006)

Scorched is a vivid journey through southern Africa’s mesmerising landscapes as climate change sets in. It wanders through the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands to capture the last faltering calls of a rain frog that was named after the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. The author pauses for thought following an elephant stampede to consider how savannahs might shift in an altered climate. She trails the wading birds of the West Coast into the high Arctic tundra for their annual breeding season before returning to a Cape which is crisping over as drought continues to grip the province. Read more…

  

 

Boiling Point: The 2007 Ruth First Memorial Lecture

When you tug on a single thing in nature, the conservationist and writer John Muir once wrote, you find it attached to the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climate crisis. Tugging on a thread of our shared atmosphere in China or the US, by shunting pollution into the skies there, is causing the fabric of local weather patterns to unravel half a world away. Read more…

  

Boiling Point: people in a changing climate (Wits University Press, 2008)

This full length book, an extension of research conducted through the Ruth First Fellowship, is now available.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Invaded: the biological invasion of South Africa (Wits University Press, 2009)

This is a story about pollution, but not oil spills, litter or filthy smoke-stacks. Invaded is about biological pollution – the plants and animals that have spread around the globe on the back of human movement, those that have traversed the boundaries of natural habitats and have begun to erode their new adopted environment.

The book explores the consequences of humankind’s intended and unintended introduction of alien species into South Africa.