One thousand people. Thirty-plus kilometres of river. Fifteen locations. Nine tons of waste removed. A precis of All Spruits Cleanup day — Johannesburg’s contribution to World Cleanup Day 2022. After glibly offering yet another numerical response, it occurred to me that while statistics seem to be the only truths we have in a vast sea of lies, even those figures, however accurate, conceal a different story.
I tend to approach things environmental from a standpoint of candid naivety. I don’t have a degree in the subject, I’m not a scientist in any other discipline and most of my opinions are based on personal experience. But then again, I can speak for a large proportion of the population that, like me, is confused and exhausted by the climate debate dialogue.
I recently became involved with some recycling projects, most of which revolved around plastic. The first was a recycling centre that had been set up in Zoo Lake, a potentially beautiful park here in Johannesburg, but worse than a landfill site after a weekend of picnicking and whatever else people do in green spaces.
The term load shedding, used here in South Africa where I now live, is a pernicious homonym for a European like me. When the lights go out in the UK it’s called a power cut. When I lived in Germany, we talked about Stromausfalls, which literally means the electricity has dropped off — how Germanic. In France, it was a coupure de courant, a cutting of the current and in Portugal, usually when it rained, people talked about a falta de energia — a lack of energy. I could go on, I’ve lived in a lot of countries, but in South Africa, load shedding is officially described as a way to distribute electrical power across multiple power sources when the electricity demand is greater than the primary power source can supply. Or, in other words, when my lights, fridge, freezer, computer and everything else I need, are turned off.
A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of travelling from here to there.
Rebecca Solnit
When I think of walking, I think of the liminal space held within each stride, past, present and future suspended and then released as a flock of historical minutiae. When I prepare for a long hike, I write long lists and arrange them in order of priority from the indispensable to the inadvisable. Then I sort one from the other. When I finally lift my pack, it is considerably lighter than the first time, though now I carry a different weight. I’ve never hiked the famous Otter Trail, variously described as being harder than climbing Kilimanjaro or a walk in the park. I’ve never hiked with ten other women for five days, some of whom I’ve never met before, most of whom have known each other for years.