No 143 - James Clarke: environmental writer-warrior

 

Does South Africa have a tradition of engaged environmental philosopher-writers analogous to that of the United States? If not, why not? Are there lurking somewhere in our libraries works equivalent to David Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and others, through to Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass? What am I missing?

            Laurens van der Post fancied himself something of a philosopher; I find his thought on the natural world a bit on the simplistic side. Who else? At a pinch, Jan Christiaan Smuts. It’s not like we lack literate lovers of nature and the wild: game rangers and botanists and ecologists and ornithologists. No shortage of current excellent scholar-writers, like Julia Martin and Duncan Brown, or of gifted journalists writing at book-length, like Leonie Joubert and the inimitable Don Pinnock – perhaps the closest we have today to such a popular ‘natural philosopher’. But a tradition of writers who truly treasure the natural world, producing books that have become classics? Has anyone really looked? Southern Africa yet lacks a literary survey to match Roderick Nash’s magisterial Wilderness and the American Mind.

            James Clarke would probably not consider himself a philosopher, and I wouldn’t claim him as one. To judge by what pops up on Google, he is most fondly remembered as a humourist, mostly expressed in his long-running ‘Stoep Talk’ column in The Star. But he took his professional journalism a lot further than most: he was concerned deeply with the human impacts on the southern African environment, and published a number of pertinent books. Though he pronounced some years ago he had ‘retired’ from environmental writing (whether or not out of despair I don’t know), but this body of work deserves, it seems to me, wider recognition than it has received.

            Of his 25-odd books, I have just four to hand.

           

The earliest is Our Fragile Land: South Africa’s environmental crisis. In it, Clarke wrote of the rampant degradation of South Africa’s already meagre soils; of the worst air pollution yet recorded over the Reef; of unregulated mine tailings and oil tanker spills; of the paucity of water on the subcontinent and an over-burden of sheer human numbers. All depressingly familiar issues. Apart from the plethora of alarming figures he wields in evidence, he touches on the bigger picture and the long view. He notes that humans obliterated many megafauna in prehistoric times; and having created through fire savannahs suitable for herbivores, set about obliterating those herds in turn: the bison and the springbok and the elephants. At the same time humans were gradually becoming better informed about the finite, self-enclosed nature of our planet, its uniqueness startlingly underlined by the 1969 Apollo moon-shots. We became ‘Spaceship Earth’, foreshadowing James Lovelock’s Gaia concept. For when Clarke published Our Fragile Earth, those moon-shots were still fresh; it was 1974. South Africa didn’t even have television then, let alone the internet, and Clarke worried that South Africans were grossly uninformed about the crisis literally engulfing them.

But don’t say we weren’t warned.

            Exactly fifty years later, has the thousand-fold explosion of media and scientific knowledge made things better? Clarke’s own signature optimism notwithstanding, it would seem not. ‘The most dangerous ingredient in the air of South Africa,’ Clarke wrote, ‘is complacency.’  Now, one must add mendacious greenwashing, deliberate misinformation, political blackmail and short-term profiteering by the poisoners themselves.

           

Indeed, Clarke found it necessary to write his ‘crisis’ book twice more. He updated it in 1991 as Back to Earth, and with the contribution of David Holt-Riddle once again in 2002, now titled Coming Back to Earth: South Africa’s changing environment. This survey covers similar ground to its predecessors, but is bigger, more comprehensive, and more holistic. Much new knowledge has been generated, as have new rhetorics – ‘sustainable development’, ‘biodiversity loss’, and ‘climate change’ are beginning to shift the terms of debate somewhat. The old issues remain – chapters are devoted to the greenhouse effect, poisoned rivers and soils (including the mind-numbingly stupid reintroduction of DDT), atmospheric pollution, population pressures and waste (non)management. But he can also deal with more recent issues such as the hole in the ozone layer and the impact of AIDS. Clarke now pays more attention to the effects of apartheid’s skewed economics on environmental inequalities. (We’re moving at this point towards ‘environmental justice’ and ‘climate change’ as the favoured terms.) Even more than before, Clarke ranges across the planet in search of parallels and established and potential solutions – of which there are plenty, by the way, if only policy-makers had the spine and imagination to implement them. Clarke is feisty and direct about this ‘poor sense of moral responsibility’: unlike the pussyfooters at COP28 recently, who seem less concerned with saving the planet than with avoiding each other’s toes, he isn’t afraid to call a spade a shovel. He is readable, thoroughly informed, at times funny. Even twenty years on, with all the hurtling changes that might have rendered some of his information redundant and views a tad dated, Coming Back to Earth still strikes one as essential reading if you’re to understand anything about why we are where we are now. Up shit creek without a candle, basically.

            Clarke hasn’t been absorbed only in the pernicious effects on natural and human health of rampant commercialised industrialisation and urbanisation. As a founding member of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, he has also been deeply concerned with the fate of wildlife as a component of the continent’s crisis. Our third and fourth books deal with this theme.

            So-called ‘fortress conservation’ – the colonial-era carving-out of regions devoted exclusively to wildlife – retains some kudos but is also being superseded by more integrative models. Much wildlife exists outside protected areas. Whatever the situation, a constant is human-wildlife conflict – so pervasive it has earned its own abbreviation, HWC. This is the burden of the third book, Save Me From the Lion’s Mouth (2012).

          

  Clarke ranges beyond Southern Africa, especially into Tanzania and Kenya, providing case-study chapters on ten species (including primates and snakes). Mostly these are the biggies, from lion and leopard to rhino and elephant, not a little based on Clarke’s own participation in lion-tagging operations and the like. A vast proportion of HWC involves the simultaneous, paradoxical vulnerability and exclusion of poor communities from conservation benefits. Those benefits include those derived from eco-tourism and controlled trophy-hunting, the latter a particularly emotive and divisive issue. Though he remains ambivalent about hunting, Clarke doesn’t shy away from it in his concluding chapter. Whatever one’s view, Clarke provides a more richly nuanced examination of the complexities than a mere blog can summarise.

Clarke has long been obsessed with the notion of ‘overkill’. He used it in passing in Our Fragile Earth, then explored it more thoroughly in Coming Back to Earth. If there’s a philosophical concept tying his works together, this might be it. Like the proverbial fox in the henhouse, killing way beyond necessity, humans too, Clarke suggests, at times indulge in orgies of destruction inflicted on other creatures as well as on each other. The massive overconsumption of resources by some people and sectors may be a societal expression of this. Clarke repeats the argument in Overkill: The race to save Africa’s wildlife (2017). Much of Africa’s wild species avoided the fate of the mammoth and the passenger pigeon because they had longer to co-evolve human-avoidance strategies – until white men with firearms arrived in the nineteenth century. Their egregious overkill, now amplified by habitat encroachment, Far Eastern syndicated plunder, and alien-species invasion, means that much is newly threatened with extinction. Alongside the historical view, Clarke offers chapters focused on some big and conventional species – lion, rhino, elephant – but also, more unusually, the equally dire depletion of our ocean resources. Still, Clarke remains determinedly upbeat in light of increased awareness, local initiatives, and shifts to more workable and just models of habitat conservation.

James Clarke may not be the most lyrical or philosophical writer on environmental matters, but he is surely one of South Africa’s most informed and informative, and passionately engaged, commentators. A career to be resoundingly applauded.

 

***