It’s like an oil spill, only it’s alive. It breathes, it thirsts, it eats, it breeds. It replicates itself over and over and over again. When pine, gum or wattle trees escape the ‘domesticity’ of a mono crop timber plantation, they can easily run feral. Many have. Through the decades, these species have spilled over grasslands, clogged up wetlands, and collected in thick eddies in streams and along river banks. These insatiable trees drink vast amounts of the country’s already scarce water supply. They supercharge wildfires. They poison the soil around their feet. They cause mass die-offs of the species that lived in their place before they came.

Until recently, government spent about R1 billion every year to mop up this kind of biological pollution. But dramatic budget cuts in 2020 mean that many of the the clean-up operations have stopped. The gains following nearly three decades of clearing thousands of hectares of invasive trees and restoring wetlands will be lost under a second wave of invasions as the trees recover and rebound.

Coming, this March.