A River Runs Through It: Reading the Text and Context of a River

Abstract

This article is framed and inspired by Jacklyn Cock’s Writing the Ancestral River (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018), which traces the history of the Kowie river in the Eastern Cape and its significance both in her own life and in shaping a specific geographical area. We set out to “read” the Kromme river through the lens of Cock’s “biography-of-a-river” approach, which is both an evocative personal account and a social and environmental history of a river. Like the Kowie, the story of the Kromme river raises issues of competing interests; environmental, economic, and social justice concerns; and the tension between a river viewed in instrumentalist terms or as a complex, precious wetland and estuary. We consider questions such as whether the natural world in itself has inalienable rights, and whether rivers—even minor ones such as the Kromme—should have the right to be protected.

Keywords:

• ecological awareness
• colonialism
• social justice
• development
• estuaries
• cultural heritage

If everything that comprises a particular stretch of land—its still and moving waters, its trees and animals, its weather and footpaths and its rocks—is viewed as a community to which human beings, too, belong, it can neither be sold nor owned, even by the people who feel they belong to it. (Lopez 2019, 274)

Introduction

Throughout history, rivers have played a central role in human society. Apart from being the site of the earliest development of human civilisation—Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus—and, later, of more technologically advanced cities and empires, such as those centred on the Seine, the Thames, the Hudson, and so forth, the image of the river has featured prominently in fiction. Examples include the Mississippi in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and the Congo in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the river can symbolise a journey, both geographical and spiritual. Closer to home, Jacklyn Cock’s Writing the Ancestral River (2018) traces the history of the Kowie river and its significance both in her personal life and in the shaping of a specific area of the Eastern Cape and, indeed, of the country as a whole.

The Kowie is to some extent emblematic of the fate of many rivers in the Eastern Cape, and that of their original pre-colonial inhabitants. Rivers such as the Bushmans, Kariega, Sundays, and Kromme (the focus of our discussion) have all felt the impact of housing development, which has often entailed the displacement of the original inhabitants and the destruction of some of the flora and fauna of that specific environment. The Kowie area saw the mass expulsion and, to some extent, eradication, of the original Khoikhoi¹ and Xhosa tribes by the British settlers, and although a comparable event did not take place on the Kromme river, the transformative effect of “development” on the environment has been inevitable.

While the first changes to the Kowie river took place a century earlier than at the Kromme—with a harbour begun at its river mouth in the early 1820s—the more impactful development of the two rivers took place in the mid to late twentieth century. The change was initiated in each case by an individual motivated by the desire to bring profitable development to the area. In the case of the Kowie, it was a local entrepreneur who constructed a marina on the estuary to provide holiday homes for those who could afford such a luxury. Similarly, on the Kromme, it was an enterprising individual who acquired land on the banks of the river and subsequently established a marina in the estuary and developed the village of St Francis Bay.

In this article, we discuss issues such as environmental exploitation and degradation, and the related issue of social justice, as the effects of this manipulation of the environment impact on various communities. Like Cock, we write about the Kromme river from a perspective of family rootedness on the river and deep personal connection with the river, spanning decades. We consider questions such as whether the natural world in itself has inalienable rights, and whether rivers—even minor ones such as the Kromme—should have the right to be protected.

A Sense of Place

The Kromme is a relatively minor river in comparison with the Kowie and other Eastern Cape rivers. The river has its source in the Langkloof valley, and joins the sea in St Francis Bay. The river is unspoilt by industrialisation and urban settlements, although its upper reaches and its tributaries have been impacted by the overextraction of water for agriculture and alien vegetation in the water course. The river is navigable by boat about 14 kilometres above the river mouth, where its upper banks are steep and vegetated with aloes and euphorbia. As the river winds towards the sea, the steep banks and deep water course give way to gentler slopes and a wider river plain with sandbanks and mudflats.

Here, on the estuary, four generations of our family have lived and spent time on the river, developing a deep connection with the place. The Kromme river has been to us— as the Kowie has been to Cock—“a constant thread” (Cock 2018, 6) in our lives over decades. We value the river not only as a site for activities such as swimming, canoeing, fishing, and bait collecting, but also for providing access to the richness of the natural world through giving us the opportunity to walk in the coastal bush, birdwatch, botanise, and discover unusual creatures in the river, such as pipefish, eagle rays, and several rare water birds.

At the river, there is a deeper sense of the rhythms of nature: the tides, the phases of the moon, and the changing seasons. Those who have a long and intimate connection with the river cherish memories of experiences such as welcoming the spring return of migratory birds: the Western osprey, and the water birds, such as the greenshanks and the ruffs (that are ruff-less here on the river, out of breeding plumage). At times, a supermoon rises over the river, pushing extra high spring tides; the river brims across the sandflats, creating a lake stretching right across to the farmland on the far bank.

Fishing enthusiasts can observe and be impressed by the variety of successful fishing techniques used by other creatures: the African fish eagle swooping to scoop up a fish from the river; the osprey plunging deep under the surface to secure a catch; the little egret remaining motionless in the river on long legs, ready to spear unwary prey; the pied and giant kingfishers perching on jetties, fixing beady eyes in preparation for a swift dive, while an otter dips and dives under the jetty, emerging with an octopus.

The calls of various bush birds, such as the orange bush shrike, hoepoe, boubou shrike, and the black-headed oriole’s liquid trill, complemented by the ringing cry of the fish eagle overhead, provide a welcome change from the hum of urban traffic. The Klaas’s cuckoo’s insistent “may-i-kie, may-i-kie” rings out tantalisingly, as even with its resplendent green-and-white plumage, it isn’t easy to spot. Nocturnal noises contribute a different repertoire, with the plaintive “good lord deliver us” of the fiery-necked nightjar, the mournful series of descending notes intoned by the water thick-knee, and the repetitive “ping-ping”, reminiscent of the blacksmith lapwing but in fact the call of the epauletted fruit bat.

The banks of the river are home to bushbuck, genets, bushpigs, caracal, vervet monkeys, mongoose, otters—and even, for a several decades, mute swans which, according to local legend, escaped from a ship wrecked in St Francis Bay in 1859.²

We experience a sense of place here, invested with a deep love for the river’s uniqueness. In the evenings, we take in the familiar view across the salt marsh, over to the farmlands on the far bank with their herds of ruminating cattle, to the distant blue outline of the Cockscomb mountain range. The Spartina grass on the salt marsh glows yellow in the evening light. The Kromme salt marshes have been spared from development, unlike the salt marsh of the Kowie, destroyed to create a marina. Cock mourns this destruction in her book: “The complex architecture of the salt marsh, a maze of channels kept clear by the sluicing action of the tides, has now been obliterated, replaced by a marina, an exclusive gated community of luxurious houses, many of them holiday homes” (2018, 6). The salt marshes of the Kromme retain the maze of channels described by Cock, and their shallows—particularly the submerged eel grass beds— serve as a breeding ground and nursery for many fish species.

On the fringes of the salt marshes, the mudbanks and sandbanks are rich in life— sandprawn, pencil bait, and bloodworm. As in the case of the Kowie, the once plentiful prawn beds on the Kromme river no longer carry as much life. The river is home to many species of fish, including mullet, spotted grunter, blacktail, and the endangered white steenbras. Longtime residents note the decline in fish in the river and miss the once-common sight of the splashing tails of the spotted grunter above the water surface as they blow prawns out from the submerged prawn holes. Many recreational fishermen now practice “catch and release”, and recall with some discomfort the family tales of huge catches in previous decades.

Close observation of the wonders of the natural world creates a sense of connection with a wider reality and enables us to see our own personal lives, and indeed human life in general, in a more comprehensive perspective and to appreciate more fully the “web of life” of which we are an integral part. This interconnectedness is captured by Barry Lopez in a conversation with South African nature writer Julia Martin, in which Lopez describes how intimacy with place (in his case, a river near his home) allows for discerning underlying relationships (Lopez and Martin 2023, 15):

I think when you’re young you want to learn the names of everything. This is a beaver, … this is a rainbow trout, this is osprey … But it’s the syntax that you really are after. Anybody can develop the vocabulary. It’s the relationships that are important. And it’s the discerning of this three-dimensional set of relationships that awakens you to how complex this is at any one moment.

Over time, we have observed how the natural flow and rhythms of the river have been altered by human developments. The road bridge, built in 1980, deflected the natural tidal flow through the saltmarshes, leading to increased silting. Damming of the river— first the Churchill dam in 1943, and then the Mpofu dam in 1983—has all but stopped the vital flow of sufficient and regular freshwater into the river system, as well as halting the natural seasonal flooding in the rainy season. Both of these natural processes are vital for sediment scouring to keep the river channels open, to supply nutrients to the river system, and to maintain the optimal salinity of the river water. With the recent increase in salinity, we have noticed marine species such as sea urchins, nudibranchs, red bait, octopus, and cuttle fish appearing from time to time in the lower reaches of the river.

Early History of the Area³

Early human occupation of the Kromme area dates back to around 700 000 years ago, with evidence of Early Stone Age hand axes and cleavers, and Middle Stone Age artefacts dating back around 100 000 years. The most recent inhabitants in pre-colonial times were the Khoisan hunter-gatherers and the Khoikhoi herders, who formed pastoralist communities, herding cattle and sheep in the area, in the last 2 000 years. Their Khoikhoi language lingers in the local place names, such as Kouga (“place of the hippopotamus”), the local municipality; and Tsitsikamma (“place of much water”), the mountains where the Kromme river has its source.

The earliest Europeans to visit the area were Portuguese explorers in the 1500s. The arrival of the Dutch trekboers in the mid 1700s led to the disruption and displacement of the local Khoisan hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. Land which had been viewed by the indigenous inhabitants as a shared resource was no longer accessible to them, and their ways of life were destroyed. Initially, the shifting dunes and poor quality veld south of the Kromme river was not attractive to the Dutch stock farmers. However, when the Gamtoos river became the border of Dutch expansion in 1771, the area between the Kromme river and the sea gradually filled up with settler farmers.

In 1878, a lighthouse was built at Seal Point (now the site of the village of Cape St Francis) in response to many shipwrecks occurring along this stretch of coast. Because of the dunefields south of the Kromme, the lighthouse was only accessible by ox wagon across the sand dunes. These dunes contained many shell middens of the Khoisan people who had recently inhabited the area, including pottery fragments, ostrich egg-shell beads, and tools. Shifting dunes would fleetingly reveal burial sites and then cover them again, though most of these middens and burial sites are now covered in vegetation or lie beneath roads and homes.

This southern and eastern Cape coast, from Port Elizabeth to Mossel Bay, has long been recognised for the significance of the archaeological evidence found here, and as early as 1946 archaeologists cautioned that archaeological sites in this area “should be protected so far as it is humanly possible” (Goodwin 1946, 116). This has not been the case in the Kromme and St Francis Bay area. As the village of St Francis Bay expanded rapidly, dunes were stabilised, roads developed, and middens flattened by bulldozers in preparation for the construction of houses. The little remaining evidence of Stone Age presence was obliterated.

Before development destroyed these archaeological sites, archaeologists had carried out a few isolated excavations in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the sand dunes in the Cape St Francis area. They studied the shell content of the middens, the burial sites, and clay pottery fragments. A family member, Rod Marshall, took a keen interest in these middens in the late 1950s/early 1960s and may have been an early practitioner of what is now called “citizen science”: concerned that these sites might be destroyed by development, he had meticulously mapped and recorded the site of each midden and coded evidence of each artefact found on the middens, so the placement of each was carefully recorded for further investigation. No attempt was made to excavate, so the middens were left intact. The file Rod Marshall kept was later submitted to Dr Johan Binneman of the Albany Museum’s Archaeology Department. Binneman (2004) went on to undertake an extensive study of the area.

“Development” of the Area

Besides the building of the lighthouse and the sale of some riverside farmland for simple holiday cottages, the area was largely remote and unchanged until the arrival of Leighton Hulett in 1954. Over the next three decades, starting with a simple fishing camp, Hulett would transform the sandy tract of land south of the Kromme river into a marina and the village of St Francis Bay. As with the Kowie story, the story of the development in the Kromme river area is portrayed as that of “one man’s vision”, propelled by a “visionary and entrepreneurial spirit” (Cock 2018, 99, 101).

By 1956, Hulett had laid out plots for sale and had begun to stabilise the dunes with alien vegetation introduced into the area: the Australian rooikrans (Acacia cyclops) and Port Jackson willow (Acacia saligna), that had also been used successfully to stabilise the dunes on the Cape Flats. The development of the village of St Francis Bay led to two main ecologically destructive actions: firstly, the development of the marina and, secondly, the stabilisation of the dunes with alien vegetation.

Construction of the canals of the marina began in 1968, with the initial canal system completed by 1978. This was the first marina to be built in South Africa. The Kromme marina development was not as destructive as that built on the Kowie in the late 1980s; here, the canals were excavated from a dune field rather than from a salt marsh. However, the dune field excavated to develop the marina was, in fact, the natural path of the Sand river, which was diverted by a sand berm to protect the marina properties. This intervention meant that the mouth of the Sand river—which would naturally have deposited its sand (and sometimes, water) into the sea—was now deflected 2 kilometres higher up into the Kromme river.

Initially, the development of the marina, with its extensive canal system, was considered to be if anything advantageous, increasing the habitat area for river life, with no adverse effects reported on the ecology of the Kromme estuary (Baird, Marais, and Wooldridge 1981). However, in later years, this tampering with the river’s natural path would have huge repercussions. Human interference with the Sand river created an “unpredictable and unmanageable system” (Schroeder 2015, 91), which led to more frequent flooding in the area, the collapse of the Sand river bridge in 2012, and the silting of the Kromme river where the Sand river’s water and silt (which naturally would have flowed to sea) was now deposited in a wide delta whenever it flooded.

Dune stabilisation has had an even more negative effect on the ecology of the area, eventually leading to the erosion of the pristine beach which had drawn so many people to St Francis Bay in the first place. This is because the dunefields in the area make up a complex, dynamic system called a “headland bypass” system. It acts as a conduit for sand, allowing the sand to travel across a peninsula from one bay to the next, thus “bypassing” the route around the coast. In this case, sand from Oyster Bay in the west would move across the headland bypass dunes and replenish the sand on the beach in St Francis Bay to the east. This is part of a larger process of sand movement eastward along the coast and across headland bypass dune systems, from Cape Agulhas in the west to Algoa Bay in the east.

In the early 1980s, further dunes were stabilised to create a new development (named Santareme, after the home town of the Portuguese explorer who had named St Francis Bay). The sand from the Santereme dunefield, which once blew onto the St Francis Bay beach, was now trapped under the newly built roads and houses. At the time, some local residents with knowledge of the workings of headland bypass dunefields raised concerns about the impact that stabilisation would have on the beach, but there seems to be no evidence of formal environmental objections made at the time. The effects on the beach of the dune stabilisation was already noted from the late 1970s, and since then the beach has eroded at a steady rate each year, losing 75 metres in width since the mid-1970s. The once wide expanse of beach, with colourful Hobie Cat sailcraft lined up on the golden sand, is now reduced to a narrow strip which is entirely under water at high tide for most of the year. And, as noted earlier, the Sand river dunefield, another source of sand for the beach, now washes its sand into the Kromme river instead.

“Saving the Beach”

To “save” the beach and homes threatened by the encroaching sea, an ambitious plan is currently afoot. Called the St Francis Bay Coastal Protection Scheme, it plans to dredge sand from the Kromme river and pump this sand onto the denuded beach. The preamble to the project frames the problem as “significant erosion events occurring over the past few decades” on the beach, as if these were naturally occurring, with no mention of the human cause: the stabilisation of the headland bypass dunefield system which had nourished the beach in the past (Coastal & Environmental Services 2021).

The proposed project highlights the tension between economic development on the one hand (the benefits of replenishing the sand on the beach and dredging deeper river channels, both good for tourism) and the rights of the river and those most connected with it, on the other hand. Dredging the river is framed mainly in terms of increasing the “recreational use of the estuary” (Coastal & Environmental Services 2021, 28) through deepening the river channels for boats. However, local residents point out that this access would be mainly for the large speedboats of the seasonal holiday makers, whereas many local folks are happy to navigate the river unhurriedly in smaller boats or non-motorised craft. They also point out that the shallow river channels at low tide have a positive impact on the salt marsh areas, because boats forced to travel at a slower speed generate smaller wakes, which are less damaging to the sensitive salt marshes, in particular the sensitive eel-grass beds (Silberbauer 2020).

The salt marsh, and the estuary as a whole, nurtures sensitive nursery areas for fish and offers vital feeding areas for birds. A diversity of waterbirds, particularly waders, feed on the nutrient-rich mudflats and sandbanks. Waders are particularly abundant in the summer months, when the estuary provides important feeding areas for thousands of migratory birds that rely on the rich invertebrate life that the ecosystem supports. Research has documented a major decline worldwide in the numbers of many migratory wader species over the last few decades, with habitat loss being cited as the major cause.

In terms of conservation importance, the Kromme river estuary has been identified as one of the most important in South Africa, ranked 17 out of about 250 South African estuaries (Turpie and Clark 2007). Nevertheless, in the draft environmental impact report (DEIR), the effect of the dredging on the estuarine flora and fauna is downplayed. The report suggests that the organisms in the dredged areas will soon recover, although this is contradicted by other research on dredging, which shows limited recovery of species in dredged areas, even decades later (Hay 2000, in Cock 2018). The report also minimises the effect on birds and fish: “there are alternative areas within the estuary in which birds and fish can feed” (Coastal & Environmental Services 2021, 60). Despite estuaries being under threat globally and nationally, the degradation of the Kromme estuary habitat (the DEIR estimates a 10 per cent reduction in the eel-grass beds, a 16 per cent reduction in intertidal areas, and a 33 per cent reduction of sandbank habitat) is balanced against the need to save the beach and increase the recreational utility of the river.

As in the case of the Kowie river, the river is portrayed as a “tourist attraction”—a commodity to be moulded and shaped to maximise particular forms of recreation. The “web of life” of the river—the intricate inter-connection between the small organisms, the fish and the birds that feed on them, and the role of the eel grass as a nursery for many fish species—is disregarded. The river is also portrayed as a source of sand extraction to fix the beach (eroded due to previous misguided human development), with little regard for the river’s natural life. As in the case of the Kowie, this illustrates “an instrumental view of a living river” (Cock 2018, 122) and the life of its banks.

In the context of huge wealth inequality in the area and high unemployment, the coastal protection scheme has also been justified in terms of job creation. It is argued that the dredging itself will create jobs, and that the beach renewal will bring new development to the area, and hence increase employment for residents of the Sea Vista township. However, many of the homes in the St Francis Bay area are occupied by owners living elsewhere who spend only a few weeks a year at their holiday homes, and so the employment opportunities are limited. Unemployment and poverty in Sea Vista township remain pressing concerns. Overall, the “saving the beach” scheme raises the complicated issues of the intersection between environmental and social justice and economic development.

Environmental and Conservation Initiatives: Protection of Natural Heritage and Cultural Heritage

While Cock notes the absence of sustained environmental activism in the Kowie area, in the Kromme area many longstanding conservation organisations are active. These include the St Francis Kromme Trust, active since 1981, taking up local environmental issues and opposing detrimental developments. For example, the Trust lobbied the harbour developers to settle on a design less detrimental to the coastline, and legally challenged developers to preserve public open space on the coastline in St Francis Bay, rather than building additional houses in this space.

Active local citizens have established the Friends of the St Francis Nature Areas (FOSTER), an organisation which supports the management of the Cape St Francis, Irma Booysen, and Seal Point nature reserves. The local Fourcade group fosters appreciation of the botanical richness in the area and organises regular walks during which plant lists are drawn up to record endemic and endangered species. These include the rare dwarf Cape beech, Rapanea gilliana, restricted to dune thicket, and fynbos species such as Erica chloroloma and a buchu, Agathosma stenopetala. Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers (CREW) and a number of local experts make an invaluable contribution to the conservation of threatened species and the relationships that sustain them.

Various initiatives are underway to eradicate or at least control invasive aliens, which are highly flammable and have fuelled many of the devastating wildfires that have ravaged the area in recent years. Weevils have been introduced from Australia, the natural habitat of the invasive rooikrans and Port Jackson willow; Working for Water teams were also employed, a temporary measure that created employment opportunities; and, recently, an enterprising farmer has even tried bringing in flocks of goats to help consume this invasive vegetation.

More recently, there has been a widening of the scope beyond protection of natural heritage to include cultural heritage too. The middens and Khoisan burial sites, some of which were previously flattened to make way for housing developments in the area, are now protected, and legislation requires that the local Gamtkwa Khoisan Council be consulted about any new developments in this Kouga area. This council represents the descendants of the area’s oldest indigenous inhabitants, the Gamtkwa Khoisan tribe. The council is based in Hankey on the nearby Gamtoos river, where Sarah Baartman was born; a “Khoisan resurgence” in the Kouga area can be traced to the return of her body here in 2002 (Burnett et al. 2023).

Land protection from environmental destruction is a core concern of the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council. In 2012, they teamed up with an alliance of concerned parties (forming Thuyspunt Alliance, comprising local residents, environmental organisations, surfers, representatives from the local fishing industry, etc.) to oppose the siting of a nuclear power station in the area. A newspaper article at the time noted that for one of the Khoisan leaders, Hettie Booysen, “the thought of a nuclear power station on top of her ancestors’ graves fills her with foreboding” (Evans, Pillay, and Eaton 2012). It is significant that, while indigenous people have historically been marginalised from debates about development and the environment, in the case of the proposed Thuyspunt nuclear power station, the Khoisan voice was prominent. The Gamtkwa Khoisan Council’s submission, based on the cultural significance of the area, played a key role in opposing the proposed nuclear build, which would have led to significant cultural and environmental devastation in the area.

Since then, there have been attempts to formalise the protection of the Thyspunt area (including the Oyster Bay bypass dunefield, that stretches east all the way to the Sand river) to protect the rich heritage represented by the extensive system of middens in the area. Spearheaded by the Thuyspunt Alliance, there is a process underway to register the Thuyspunt area with the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) as a “cultural landscape” of national significance. This protection of cultural heritage will also play an environmentally significant role, protecting the area from development and sand-mining of its dunefields.

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Competing interests are inevitably at play around the Kromme river. For some, especially those who have dwelt comfortably on its banks for many years, the appreciation of the river for ecological, aesthetic, or even sentimental reasons is paramount; for others, the river is appreciated primarily as a means of survival. These competing interests are explored in a poem by Adré Marshall titled “Swan Downing”,⁴ which expresses nostalgia for a past era in the life of the river:

Swans glide serenely on the glass face

each tethered to a perfect, mirrored twin

each holding a pair of curved white sails

held tightly round a heart-shaped keel

The picture of thistledown girls

shows them flinging morsels of bread

into the air from the jetty’s end

to the waiting fleet of orange beaks

People believe they came from the Thames

on a ship sailing around the Cape

when in stormy seas it ran aground

here, off Cape St Francis coast

Over the years, fluffy swanlets

bloomed like furry brown buds

on the rippling river, bobbing

in the wake of the snowy fleet

Later, the children’s buckets waited

empty, but the swans had dwindled, gone,

taken up, but not for counting

by those for whom the river gave food

Today, sometimes, a soft white feather

floats on the river’s face, and trails

pictures of those gossamer days

that ended with our own Swan Downing.

Conclusion

Inspired by Cock’s Writing the Ancestral River, we have set out to “read” the Kromme river through the lens of Cock’s “biography-of-a-river” approach, which is both an evocative personal account and a social and environmental history of her beloved Kowie river. Like the Kowie, the story of the Kromme river also raises issues of competing interests; environmental, economic, and social justice concerns; and the tension between a river viewed in instrumentalist terms or as a complex, precious wetland and estuary.

In writing our story of the Kromme, we found our attention ranging beyond the course of the river itself. There was the story of the Sand river, diverted to make way for the marina. There were the dunefields, stabilised to develop houses and roads, which in turn cut off the nourishment of the St Francis Bay beach, which had drawn people to the area at the outset. Then there were the plans to “save the beach” by dredging the river. Everything was interconnected. The flattened Khoisan middens and burial sites in St Francis Bay led us further afield, to where the Sand river/Oyster Bay dunefield crosses the cape behind Thuyspunt. There was the story of the Khoisan “resurgence” to protect their culture heritage and a local alliance successfully halting a nuclear power project. The story of the river was inextricably interconnected with everything else in the area. As John Muir, the American naturalist observed, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is hitched to everything else in the universe” (1911, 110).

In keeping with a respect for the rights and cultural heritage of the Khoisan, there is a growing awareness that society needs to move in a new direction more attuned to indigenous understandings of the natural world. This is a worldview based on an appreciation of kinship with nature, rather than on control of the natural world or a materialistic evaluation of the concrete benefits we can extract from the environment. This requires a revisioning of the world, with no division between the human and the natural world, as captured in the epigraph by Barry Lopez: “if everything that comprises a particular stretch of land … is viewed as a community to which human beings, too, belong” (2019, 274). This view of nature as an interconnected web (first put forward by Alexander von Humboldt in the eighteenth century) was popularised by Rachel Carson in the 1960s through her pioneering evocative and poetic scientific writing, which powerfully changed how her readers viewed the natural world. Of course, this ecological “web of life” concept existed in indigenous communities, like the Khoisan, long before it was articulated in Europe.

There is recognition today that sentience, even consciousness, is not the monopoly of the human race. All living beings may have some measure of consciousness; research on forests reveals that trees communicate via a subterranean network of tree–fungus mutualism, referred to as “the wood wide web”. Robert MacFarlane writes evocatively about this “collaborative intelligence” in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) and Richard Powers has also written powerfully about this in his Pulitzer Prize- winning novel The Overstory (2018).

Moving from species-ism to a wider engagement with ecosystems enables a recognition that an ecosystem as such has the right to be respected. In some legal systems, living beings such as trees, and non-living entities such as mountains, rivers, and ecosystems, are viewed as deserving of legal protection (Steiner and Lucht 2022). These changes have all been grounded in a growing recognition of indigenous views on the natural world. For example, New Zealand was the first country to give a river, sacred to the Maori people, full legal rights. Bolivia was the first to grant all of nature equal rights to humans, and Ecuador has also amended its constitution to acknowledge the rights both of individual species and of the ecosystem (Vidal 2012). In his forthcoming book Is a River Alive?, the nature writer Robert McFarlane sets out to explore the rights of rivers and other non-living entities. Perhaps the concept of ubuntu—a person is a person through other people—could be expanded to include the recognition that a person is a person through connection with other beings, with the whole natural world. We are mutually interdependent, enmeshed in the web of life.

In a developing country like South Africa, with shocking inequality between rich and poor, the demands of social justice and human development could be more highly regarded than those of environmental protection. However, we need to recognise that globally these two are closely enmeshed and that destruction of ecosystems always impacts most catastrophically on the poor, as demonstrated globally in devastating floods, wildfires, and droughts. In Brazil, the destruction of vast tracts of the Amazon rainforests to make way for agriculture has led to the death and displacement of indigenous people and has increased carbon emissions that contribute to global climate change. These events prompt us to recognise that environmental crimes are crimes against humanity, and that ecocide can lead to genocide.

Cock notes that much environmental activism springs from an “attachment to place” (2018, 141)—we see this in the Khoisan activism stemming from a deep sense of place in cultural landscapes under threat by development, as well as in Cock’s own activism, stemming from her deep childhood connection with the Kowie. For other writers too, their advocating for the natural world often arises from a deep connection with childhood places, for example the mountains of MacFarlane’s (2009) childhood or the wetlands experienced by a young Annie Proulx (2022). However, globally, in increasingly urbanised and technologically focused human lives, there is a growing alienation from the natural world, which MacFarlane describes as “a prising away of life from place” (2009, 203). It becomes increasingly important to create opportunities for upcoming generations to connect more deeply with the natural world and to develop an ecological consciousness of the urgent crises facing our planet.

Notes

1 The Khoikhoi were pastoralists, moving between the coastal areas and inland in search of grazing. Collectively, the indigenous “First Nations” communities in South African are known as the Khoisan, comprising the Khoikhoi and the San (who were historically nomadic hunter-gatherers).

2 The Kromme’s swan population disappeared in the late 1980s, and their demise remains a mystery to ornithologists. Possible reasons put forward include competition for resources from indigenous waterfowl, natural predation of the chicks (by otters, fish eagles etc.), or human predation.

3 Much of the historical information in this section has been obtained from St Francis Kromme Trust (2011). A more detailed historical account of the area can be found in that publication.

4 The title echoes Stanley Spencer’s famous painting Swan Upping, a reference to the annual ritual on the Thames whereby the swans, regarded as the property of the reigning monarch, were taken out of the river and checked before being replaced.