Scorched

- Scorched: the launch

Scorched was launched on 2 November 2006 at the succulent conservatory in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

Leonie’s speech:

I had written today’s speech in at least half a dozen different ways – each time trying to fashion some kind of a window onto this messy and unhappy subject which I hoped, just for tonight, would offer a view which wouldn’t sour the taste of this delicious wine in our mouths.

Then, when I thought I finally had it pegged down, British economist Sir Nicholas Stern scuppered the entire thing. On Monday this week he handing to the British Cabinet a report which explores the economic costs of climate change. His story didn’t just grab newspaper headlines, it frog marched its way across front pages, business inserts and opinion sections everywhere.

So it was right back to the drawing board, this time with Stern’s paperwork strewn across my desk.

His conclusions draw finer details onto the larger body of suspicion that we’ve had for a long time. If we continue to pump greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere as we are now: we will bring about an economic slump equivalent to the Great Depression in the 1930s; a “business as usual” approach will drive global temperatures 5°C higher than pre-industrial levels; global living standards will be slashed by 5 to 20%; carbon dioxide pollution shunted up into our skies will cause damage amounting to US$85 per metric tonne.

Stern speaks the language of policymakers and economists and has produced one of the most important documents on the subject to emerge in recent years.

The problem with the Stern report and every other economic summary of the value of the world and all the services it provides, is that they don’t capture the way the wind stirs the leaves of the silvertree protea, making them flash like fish scales in the water. They fail to record the nuanced scent of the Darling Ivory orchid as it whispers to its solitary pollinating bee. Economic reports don’t feel the rumble in the chest of an elephant mother as she natters quietly with her young. Nor do they eavesdrop on the soprano whistles, throaty croaks and staccato chirrups of frogs singing to their mates in the rainy season.

Neither do they capture the space left in the air above coastal fynbos when the sandveld copper butterfly no longer flies nor the loss to the renosterveld community when the last geometric tortoise dies. They don’t hear the crackle of the bush as the cinders of another fire cool. Nor do they trace the lines in mud as a riverbed dries and splits. They don’t silhouette the taught and bloated belly of a malnourished child living far from First World excess.

I tried, through the journey of these pages, to put a real face onto the drier facts and figures of climate change. Mostly, I tried to make it fundamentally local – to capture the call of the black backed jackal in an African dusk or describe the psychedelic mayhem of Sodwana’s reefs.

It’s poignant that we’re launching the book here tonight because we’re in the heart of one of the most rare and botanically diverse plant communities on the planet – a diversity hotspot, whose conservation is regarded by ecologists as needing international priority. But it is also one where the natural environment is most vulnerably to losing its many and varied plants and animals as climate change sets in.

We’re standing on something of a Noah’s Ark that has sprung many leaks: the desert is pushing down from the north, the westerly storm tracks which bring our winter rain are increasingly missing the continent and dumping their water out at sea, temperatures are climbing, droughts are hotter and more frequent, fires are more ferocious than ever.

I don’t envy the scientists who, in the face of this change, already know they must perform a kind of ecological triage with species of the Cape – they must decide which are the terminal cases and those which might stand a small chance of survival. Then they must throw their full weight behind saving the salvageable while the others drift away from us into non-existence.

In the mean time the writers amongst us can scrabble about in an effort to capture the last faltering call of a ghost frog that now only occurs in six south-facing streams on that chunk of ancient rock behind us. Or document the glint of early morning sun on the petals of an orchid which now occurs on a single conservancy in the Swartland within an expanding sea of wheat and vineyards.

I have calculated that if I am lucky enough to live for sixty more years, if my mind holds, and if I were able to write a short cameo of a different Cape plant every week for the duration of those sixty years – by the time I turn 94, I will only have covered about a third of all the plants that occur naturally in this region. I would need another two lifetimes to get through the rest. And a few more to give equal measure to all the insects, reptiles, birds, fish, soil microbes, fungi…

This is our role as writers – to distill from the air around us the very essence of life which no economic report can capture. And to do so before the inevitable arrival of death.