CONGRESS 55
Presidential Address:
55 th Annual Congress of
the Grassland Society
of Southern Africa
30 June – 2 July 2020
Dr Debbie Jewitt
Current Address: Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife
E-mail Address: [email protected]
Never waste the opportunity offered
by a good crisis! And what a
crisis we have had! The COVID-19
pandemic has certainly presented itself
as a global crisis, turning our normal
world upside down, yet at the same
time offering opportunities to change
and innovate.
It is major events such as these that
push us over a threshold into a new paradigm,
analogous to the state and transition
models so well known in ecological
theory, where an abrupt change in a
feature occurs due to a variable thought
to drive it, in this case, human health
and well-being, and a virus.
It is good that humans have been given
pause for thought. The pandemic has
broken basic assumptions about our
lives. It has illustrated that our destructive
behaviour towards nature is endangering
our health – a reality that we
have been ignoring for a long time.
Diseases such as COVID, Zika, Aids,
SARS and Ebola have all originated
from animal populations under severe
environmental conditions.
We are forced to ask: have we really
been managing our world in a sustainable
manner? Are we working with
or against nature? The pandemic has
served to demonstrate how connected
we are and yet how fragile our earth is.
And how reliant we are on natural systems
for our health and well-being.
On December 24, 1968, astronaut William
Anders took this iconic photograph
of Earth from the moon's orbit during
the Apollo 8 mission. It is considered
one of the most influential photographs
ever taken.
This photograph bred new thinking.
For the first time, we could see our
home in its entirety. A beautiful planet
- the only known oasis for life for
light-years around.
For the first time, we could see that
earth was not limitless and indestructible.
Indeed, it is small and fragile.
Earth’s resources are finite and there
are natural limits to human expansion.
For the first time, we saw ourselves as
global citizens.
Whilst this pandemic has rapidly manifested
itself across our world and
brought our normal lives to a halt, forcing
us to rethink, other threats are not
as immediately apparent.
Their impacts may take years to manifest,
with shifting baselines creating
new but lower standards. But if not addressed,
these threats could lead to a
collapse of society as we know it.
Jared Diamond in his book “Elements
of collapse. How societies choose to fail
or succeed”, defines collapse as a drastic
decrease in human population size
and/or political/economic/social complexity,
over a considerable area, for an
extended time”.
He ascribes the main causes of societal
collapse to environmental changes, the
effects of climate change, hostile neighbours,
unavailability of trade partners
and the society’s response to the foregoing
four challenges.
The environmental problems he describes,
we all know well: deforestation
and habitat destruction, soil erosion,
salinization and soil fertility losses, water
management problems, overhunting,
overfishing, alien invasive species,
overpopulation, the increased per-capita
impact of people, climate change,
build-up of toxins in the environment,
and energy shortages amongst others
such as land degradation, food security
and equality.
These slow but often cumulative threats
are no less deadly in their consequences
than the pandemic and yet they are
seen as inconvenient truths, and remedies
to fix these problems as stumbling
blocks to classic economic development.
If the future environmental scenarios
being put forward were truly listened
to, we would all be actively changing
things. We would be looking at our vulnerabilities
and reducing our risks.
Never before has the need been so
high or so critical to find solutions to
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Grassroots Vol 20 No 3 September 2020