Humans, Hubris, and Mother Nature

Four days ago, we drove down from the Drakenburg mountains to the "North Coast," that is, northeast of Durban, to St. Lucia.  We passed endless fields of sugar cane and tree farms as far as the eye can see, pines and eucalyptus.  The former has been cultivated for a long time here, as the first South Asia Indians came as indentured servants to work in the cane fields.  Trees are a relatively new crop, since the early 1950s we were told.  

European settlers planted the fast-growing trees as cash crops, but pines and eucalyptus suck up huge amounts of ground water.  The result was that the water level of Catalina Lake (named for an English seaplane that crashed in this brackish water), a critical part of the local estuary system, dropped dramatically.  To compensate, the then-aparthied government dredged the mouth of the estuary to let more seawater in, which didn't do the indigenous plants and animals any good. At the same time, the Europeans tried to raise cattle in the grasslands, but it was too hot, too dry, and the cattle all died.

With the end of apartheid, the new Mandela government set out to right the ecological inbalance by cutting down as many of the non-native trees as they could.  The result was South Africa's first World Heritage Ecological site, a now-healthy reserve comprising 5 distinct ecosystems, from the marine of the Indian Ocean to the grasslands that support hundreds of mammals, birds, even 80 species of dragonfly.  Policy matters, and as we know and are going to experience under he-that-shall-remain-unnamed, bad policy destroys.

We explored the area as much as time and heat would allow (it hit 104 yesterday).  Yesterday we spend the day on a self-driving safari in Hluhluwe-iMfomosi Reserve at whose entrance stood this memorial.

Quite an amazing memorial, with etchings of the main tenets of the world's major religions (although the claim that Judaism's is  "I am that I am" would no-doubt  be fodder for Talmudic scholars for a long time) and pleas for the supremacy of love.  Most impressive was the plaque below, a memorial not to fallen war heroes, but to those who died for conservation. Imagine that on US soil!

 

We saw a lot, especially from a blind above a waterhole.  When we arrived, a few other humans were there and just this lazing black rhino.

 

Then the Cape buffalo came (and all the humans left). 

 

Then a family of giraffes came and drank deeply.

 And of course, with water, lots of bird activity, including Blue-cheeked bee-eaters skimming the pool...

 

And this Mocking chat, who seemed as curious of us as we of him.