For Cape Town to survive, it needs more than just a good technical approach to managing water
The caterpillars are a vital source of protein and income but are being overharvested
Climate change negotiations are like a 17-year group effort to write a book. Will Durban close a chapter?
Without measurable targets, how are we going to achieve our climate change goals?
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/ 15 September 2009
The term “refugee” isn’t one governments want to talk about in the context of climate change
We’ve evolved to have the pattern-recognition software in our brains, even if it sometimes leads us to false conclusions.
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/ 3 February 2009
Consider how radically an understanding of the heavens has changed; how we view ourselves and our place in the universe.
Ten years after emigrating to the Mother City from the Eastern Cape, I still can’t quite get used to the gulf between the "haves" and the "have nots".
It’s not often that a national monument gets to fast-track that awkward birds-‘n-bees conversation.
Leonie Joubert chats to former provincial environment minister Tasneem Essop after her sudden departure from politics
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/ 23 September 2008
Give me a pearly white smile! There you go. Now consider this: the calcium in your teeth was cooked up inside a giant red star, billions of years ago.
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/ 9 September 2008
Leonie Joubert to lucifer: You make it easier for us to live with ourselves. It’s easier to hold that an external agency paved the way for us.
I have decided to become a fairaeologist — one who studies fairies. I believe I see fairies. I’m sure they exist.
History probably does have a bit of a musty public persona — seemingly crusty, tweed-clad and whiffing faintly of mothballs.
The museum — small, intimate and in the very spot where it all took place — remembers the man, the remarkable history of heart transplant surgery.
I wake with a snort, roused by the clatter of a ballpoint pen hitting the floor. It spins idly to a halt, put there by the same peaches-and-cream striped paw now tapping one end of it. How easily the modern quill is reduced to a plaything! Blink, blink, blink. The cursor on my computer screen winks expectantly. Above it, the line: To breed or not to breed … Blink, blink, blink.
According to an arcane superstition pre-dating the Enlightenment, I can be a bitch at times. We all can, now and then, but my predisposition was determined by the position of our sun in relation to a specific arrangement of celestial bodies a few hundred light years away, at the time of my birth.
A projectile the size of a child’s fist shot across the lawn and buried itself in a crouching rhododendron bush. It was summer in the early 1980s and we kids were home from school. My brother, his head crammed with potions learned in the science class, had cobbled together a handful of innocuous kitchen ingredients and turned them into something entirely more volatile.
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/ 10 September 2003
Fynbos is the smallest but richest floral kingdom in the world and has been harvested for the fresh-flower market for decades. Harvesting of wild fynbos in the Western Cape may soon be governed by a set of guidelines requiring environmentally sustainable and socially responsible practice.
The debate about nuclear power has escalated with the approach of the final deadline on Monday for appeals against Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa’s approval of a pebble bed modular reactor in the Western Cape.