Chapter 2
GOLDEN THREADS
Lives depend on keeping Africa’s old-growth grasslands healthy. They feed our herds, they’re water factories, and they mop up carbon pollution from the atmosphere, which stabilises the climate across the globe.
Protecting them from overuse, invasive trees, and increasingly volatile weather extremes calls for collaborations that straddle national borders, private fence lines and the boundaries of over-burdened commonages.
4 May 2025
A tale of two dams
In his State of the Nation Address, President Ramaphosa boasted of the preparations to build the Ntabelanga Dam in the Eastern Cape. However, this R10-billion construction will quickly go to waste if the grasslands above it aren’t repaired, and catchment restoration is dead in the water after government funding cuts and stagnant tendering processes.
Grasslands restoration is as important as engineering solutions to ensure SA’s future water security.
First published in the Daily Maverick.
11 May 2025
Cross-boundary cooperation key to reversing ‘tragedy of the commons’ in grasslands
Lives depend on keeping SA’s old-growth grasslands healthy. They feed our herds, they’re water factories and they mop up carbon pollution, which stabilises the climate. Protecting them from overuse, invasive trees and increasingly volatile weather extremes calls for collaborations that straddle national borders, private fence lines and the boundaries of overburdened commonages.
First published in the Daily Maverick.
13 July 2025
Piles of sh*t [1] — Communal farmers tackle nappy waste, and the climate crisis
Lives depend on keeping Africa’s old-growth grasslands healthy. But a grim form of pollution in the Eastern Cape — soiled nappies — is undermining communal farmers’ ability to be good stewards of shared grazing. A simple solution shows how local action, if done at scale, will have regional and global implications as the climate becomes more volatile.
First published in the Daily Maverick.
15 July 2025
Piles of sh*t [2] — Corporates are at odds with our constitutional right to a healthy, safe environment
The story of a cattle herding community tackling single-use nappy pollution in the Eastern Cape’s communal grasslands shows up the foundational flaw in the global use-and-discard economy. Consumers are expected to mop up the pollution coming out of its tailpipe, when powerful profit-taking corporations should be turning off the pollution at source.
First published in the Daily Maverick.
30 July 2025
Piles of sh*t [3]: Solutions to Africa’s nappy pollution crisis
Plastic pollution was a big-ticket item at a recent meeting of African environment ministers in Nairobi. The experience of communal farmers in the Eastern Cape, who are tackling single-use nappies polluting their veld, shows that we need a whole-of-society response to stop indestructible plastics from befouling our environment, bodies and economy.
First published in the Daily Maverick.
19 Aug 2025
Piles of sh*t [4]: A community’s fight against water contamination in Matatiele
As countries fail to adopt a treaty to throttle plastic pollution globally, the story of Eastern Cape herders tackling the scourge of throwaway nappies in communal grazing unwittingly exposes a new form of pollution sweeping in across the region. Airborne microplastics may be to a critical SADC water factory what acid rain was to Europe and North America in the 1980s.
First published in the Daily Maverick.