Green Options

Three stories in the press over the last few weeks, have given South African’s unusual concerns about swimming off Cape Town’s beaches, surfing around the estuaries of Eastern Cape Rivers and canoeing in the Umgeni River.
Sharks Around Cape Town Beaches

A Zimbabwean man holidaying in Cape Town was killed, when he was attacked by what is believed to be a great white shark at Fish Hoek beach in Cape Town.
Ninety three shark attacks, 12 fatal, were reported in the Eastern and Western Cape beaches in the last 18 years compared to only 19, with one death, on KwaZulu-Natal’s beaches. The shark nets installed there have reduced attacks by 99%, since the 1960s, when attacks were a frequent occurrence. But nets are not suitable for Cape beaches because of rough seas, the presence of whales and seals and the type of sharks.

While Brisbane’s waste removal system battles to discard perfectly good mangos, this contrasts starkly with the difficulties and opportunities associated with agricultural produce gluts in poor communities in rural Africa.

Brisbane Mangoes
So good is the mango harvest this year, that residents of Brisbane’s suburbs are battling to get rid of their excess mangos.

Apparently some trees are dropping up to 60 mangoes overnight. If these are simply placed in rubbish bins they are too heavy for the mechanical garbage trucks and get left on the street. Normally there would be a $24 fee to get a garbage truck to come back and empty the bin, but the City Council has agreed to waive this cost so long as residents first remove the mangoes. The Council has also removed the charge for dumping mangoes at the city’s transfer stations.

So in Australia the fuss is about getting the mangoes to the dump and not about the waste of food or the loss of income opportunities, that bother the African.

This post presents amazing video clips of the courtship behaviour of six birds. Such amazing behaviour that is linked to appearance and build is worth thinking about just over 200 hundred years after the birth of Darwin. The post simply explains the behaviour in a single paragraph, gives a link for further study and leaves the reader to watch the short video.
Sage-Grouse

The sage-grouse from temperate North America, is one of the many species of birds that practice lekking, a behaviour in which the male birds gather and put on displays that aim to attract female birds. The female bird selects a male based on her judgement of the display. The most attractive males mate with many females strengthening the advantage of an attractive display.

The Great Green Wall of Africa was announced by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal at the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference on 16 December 2009. Although this is still just a plan looking for funders, the way in which it has been handled to date gives an insight into the difficulty Africa has in implementing.
The Background
This Great Green Wall of Africa, aimed at halting desertification, has its origins in a Summit of Leaders and Heads of States of the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD),  held in June 2005 in Ougadougou (Burkina Faso). The summit adopted the “Great Green Wall initiative as one of its priority programmes”. Just these few phrases  illustrate shortcoming often seen in Africa. Calling it an initiative and a priority programme distract from the need to do things as one would in a project or a task.

African Elephant Bull Photographed in Kruger Park on 20 June 2009.
The author’s last two posts have shown that culling is often used as a “solution” to limit the growth in animal numbers in a particular situations. At the extremes, some animal rights lobbyists oppose the killing of animals on the basis of principle alone ignoring environmental or wildlife issues while some legislators look for a fast fix without a long term view and justify killing by the need to protect the remaining.
There are always a range of opinions and solutions which can be considered in these cases. There is normally neither enough time nor enough information to allow the development of a solution that is acceptable to all and guarantees a longterm solution to the problem. In this context, it is instructive to look at the elephant as an example of the difficulties in finding solutions even in very well studied cases.
Please note that this is a layman’s understanding based on a quick “reading” of two recent major reports and is clearly open to much discussion. The author is simply trying to get a simple overall understanding of managing elephant populations and to also present some interesting information contained in the two reports.

Controlling an Over Abundance of Elephants
Although many press reports focus on the threats to elephants through capture, poaching and commercial hunting, the African Elephant in South Africa is probably more threatened by their successful adaption to protected ranges than directly by man.

The Fur Seal - victim of possibly the most emotive culling.
A recent post on the culling of rabbits on Robin Island, prompted a quick look at news items on culling over the last month. This revealed a variety of motivations for culling, very different numbers culled and a range in the opposition to the culls. The culling of a quarter of a million dairy cows in an attempt to raise milk prices with almost no protest is the outlier in the group.
40,000 Domestic Goats and Sheep in Netherlands
The Dutch government is culling 40,000 goats and sheep this month in an attempt to limit the spread of Q fever, an animal-borne disease that can cause flu-like symptoms in people. It is believed that Q fever has caused six human deaths in the Netherlands in 2009.

A new phase in the ongoing efforts to control the rabbits on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison, will see rabbits being dressed for human use and donated to charity.

Robben Island
Robben Island really came into the news with the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the change of government in South Africa. International concerts featuring his cell number and visits to the museum by world figures added to the allure of the island a 30 minute ferry trip from Cape Town.

Then Robben Island made the news for less savoury activities that reflect the negative side of South Africa - political cronyism, mismanagement and corruption which lead to a deterioration in the museum and the island and eventually the replacement of the Robben Island Museum’s (RIM) complete management structure. A report on the operation of RIM in this period is still being withheld, against all kinds of pressure, by the Government.

Yesterday, a “thanksgiving” festival for the seasons first fruits included the killing of a black Nguni bull by hand by 40 young men, after legal attempts to stop it failed. The annual festival was hosted by King Zwelithini of the Zulu Nation and attended by President Jacob Zuma of South Africa and other dignitaries.

Nguni Cattle
More South Africans Lean About Ukweshwama
A few days ago firebrand Julius Malema, the President of the ANC Youth League, said three times to reporter Deborah Patta that she knew nothing of the Pedi traditions. While we often like to not hear what Malema has to say, and he certainly knows little of the traditions of English South Africans, his words rang true given the storm now raging in South Africa over the Ukweshwama festival that includes the barehanded ritual slaughter of a bull by a group of 40 young men.

A renewed effort at increasing the uptake of domestic solar water heater (SWH) systems looks to replace 620 MW of electricity, to reduce carbon emissions by 2,7 million tons carbon dioxide and  create jobs and develop skills and manufacturing capacity.

Personal Experience
After recently having a domestic hot water geyser fail and investigating the potential of replacing it with a solar unit, I definitely saw the need for something different to advance the penetration of solar water heating in South Africa. While replacing my electric geyser costs R 5,500, an equivalent solar installation costs around R 25,000. Eskom, the state electricity generator, provides a subsidy of around R 3,000 and indicates a payback period is 5 to 8 years.

The complexity and cost of clearing land mines, which are still responsible for to twenty to thirty thousand casualties a year, has lead to a microorganism based detection method that should speed the location mines.

The awesome power released by a detonating mine

The New Mine Detection Technology
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have engineered a bacteria using the latest BioBrick technology. BioBrick an open source technology of the BioBricks Foundation, a not-for-profit organization founded by engineers and scientists from MIT, Harvard, and UCSF. Simplistically stated, it offers the ability to introduce standardised strands of DNA with known function into bacteria. In this case the Bricks gave the ability to detect the chemicals leaked by buried explosives and to produce chemicals that cause it to glow green. Linking these new functions together produces a safe, easy to grow bacteria that after application to the ground in a coulourless liquid glows green within a few hours. With the location of the mine noted, de-mining can be undertaken quickly without the risk of undetected mines.