While South Africa experiences one of its driest seasons, storms ravage the Mozambican coastline. Coincidence? No, says Leonie Joubert in Scorched: South Africa’s Changing Climate (Wits University Press). Examining available research, she has created a definitive guide, not only to the changing weather patterns, but also to how the climate will affect the fauna and flora of our country.
‘Each day you and I scurry to work and worry about making ends meet: governments draft Bills and table motions around numerous agendas, climate change scientists feed numbers into computers and mull over the sometimes impenetrably complicated results,” Joubert writes. ‘While all this goes on, plants and animals outside of this paradigm wake or retire with the sun every morning and go about the business of surviving.”
Besides the environmental struggles fauna and flora face, she says, ‘they must now contend with climate too”.
Climate change studies are very scientific, Joubert admits, and there are a lot of graphs, data and numbers to calculate what is happening to Mother Earth.
‘I have taken some of the predictions put forward by South Africa’s scientific community and put a face to them: elephants and expanding savannah, a spread of reef and croaking frogs, among others,” she says. ‘Hopefully some gritty reality has emerged from the graphs and maps churned out by the complex algorithms. And a strong sense of responsibility.”
As an environmental reporter, for me Joubert’s book has become a well-used reference. Her research is immaculate, but, like a gripping horror story, its tale leaves you grim-faced about South Africa’s environmental future.
Another definitive report on climate change is The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review by Nicholas Stern (Cambridge University Press). Released last year, the 700-page document has been bound into a book for easy access, though it is certainly doesn’t make light bedtime reading.
The Stern report is fascinating, but I struggled through the section on the economic impact of climate change, which Stern predicts will wreak havoc on our Earth. Despite its complexity, this book is prescribed reading for anyone with a professional interest in the environment and the economy.
The report issues a stern warning to every capitalist and economist who ignores its findings: your money-making ability will be severely impaired if you ignore the effects of climate change. And therein lies its power: it is written by an economist for a capitalist audience, appealing to their capitalistic instincts.
Fragile Earth: Views of a Changing World (Collins) is another heavy read, which uses spectacular graphics and frequently depicts the affects of climate change on the Earth through ‘now” and ‘then” photos. This excellent book is more than an all-out assault on climate change, and focuses on other factors changing the world we live in.
It divides our dynamic, fragile Earth into nine chapters. The Restless Earth chapter looks at the impact of volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and landslides. A chapter on extreme storms follows, while the next, Man-Made World, shows how humanity’s influence is forever changing the planet. This is one of the most fascinating parts of the book. It looks at how people have reclaimed land from the ocean, using case studies from Singapore and The Netherlands backed up with full-colour maps tracking the changes. Dams are also brought to the fore, with the book noting that only a ‘handful” of wild rivers remain unchecked by dams.
The book claims that given the rate at which cities are expanding, humankind will soon live in predominantly urban environments. An interesting graph shows how the design of tall buildings just keep getting taller each year. Once again, before and after photos show how cities have changed radically in just a century.
The second-last chapter offers essays by different authors on the future of the Earth in the light of the serious changes it has undergone. Elizabeth Colbert says: ‘Humans aren’t the first species to alter the planet on a geological scale; that distinction belongs to early bacteria, which some two-billion years ago, invented photosynthesis. But we are the first species to be in a position to understand what we are doing.”
In the far corner of my bookshelf, reserved for the most beautiful books, is the imposing Life: A Journey Through Time by Frans Lanting (Taschen). The book is huge and its pages serve to remind one of the wonders of life that the Earth supports.
The book is described as a ‘lyrical interpretation of the history of life”. Says Lanting. ‘I wanted to tell the story of life from its early beginning to its present diversity by capturing images that evoke nature through time.”
That telling begins with ‘Elements”, depicting earth, air, fire, water and space; ‘Beginnings”, which tracks the journey of single-cell entities into complex creatures; ‘Out of the Sea”, which focuses on life moving from the ocean to land; and ‘On Land”, showing how the Earth was conquered by fauna and flora.
Lanting moves to life in the sky in the chapter ‘Into the Air”, which ends with a life-altering event — the meteorite that caused the demise of dinosaurs. ‘Out of the Dark” looks at the life of mammals and the book concludes with the chapter ‘Planet of Life”.
While the images are the mainstay of the book, Lanting also includes personal essays and stories of his so-called journey though time. He says the idea of looking into the past by capturing present-day images presented quite a challenge. Lanting travelled to the extremes of the Earth to find the right images to depict incidents forever lost. As you’ll discover, it was a journey well worth his effort and time — and yours.