Chapter 3
OIL SPILL
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.
19 May 2025
Government kills funding for best weapon against thirsty invasive trees
Water-greedy alien trees — especially pine, eucalyptus, and wattles — are amongst the biggest threats to South Africa’s precarious water future. Infecting them with insects or diseases from their home countries is the most effective and affordable way to slow this form of ‘pollution’. But state funding disruptions have put a stop to any new research into novel biocontrol agents.
Photo credit: Grant Martin
First published in the Daily Maverick.
Coming to Nature Africa…
State funding cuts kill most effective control method for invasive trees in South Africa
Water-greedy alien trees — especially pine, eucalyptus, wattles, and mesquite — are amongst the biggest threats to South Africa’s already scarce water resources.
State funding cuts to the country’s best long-term solution, biocontrol agents, risk the future of a conservation method where South Africa is a global leader.
Watch this space, more coming soon…
Pollution doesn't make for easy sonnets or flowing, romantic narratives. And that's what this book is about — a form of pollution which is so subtle and insidious that many people do not realise it is there.
Invaded: the biological invasion of South Africa is about biological pollution, the kind that comes in dense hedges of lush greenery, blooming fields of heady petals or gracefully draped creepers. It may spread incognito on the wings of a bird, tug on the end of an angler's line or scurry unnoticed through the undergrowth.
The book explores the plants and animals that have traversed the borders and boundaries of their natural habitats and made their way into South Africa over the past 300 years and more.
Invaded visits come of the different species that have arrived in our country during the past three centuries, and the threats they pose or have the potential to become.
Ultimately, the book tries to quantify how these species have changed systems, disrupted the natural environment, and threatened the future of the country's many unique plants, animals, and habitats.
More wordsmithery…
“Invaded is about biological pollution, the kind that comes in dense hedges of lush greenery, blooming fields of heady petals or gracefully draped creepers.”