Sacrifice and the Karoo
March 21, 2012
Today was Human Rights Day in South Africa and this morning we joined a small group of people in Greenpoint Park to protest against the proposed fracking in the Karoo. Among the most basic of human rights is the right to clean and safe water, the very thing that fracking undermines.
My childhood recollection of the journey through the Karoo from Johannesburg to Cape Town was one of two endpoints and mostly nothingness between. It’s a long road – a little short of a thousand miles – of which the Karoo crossing makes up more than half. Growing up, I always thought of the Karoo as something one went through, not somewhere one went to. It was a stretch of the road or railway where you would turn up the aircon and find ways occupy the mind until the crossing was complete, or better yet, do the trip at night to avoid the dryness and the heat and emptiness.
I first saw the Karoo through different eyes in 1997. We’d driven 40,000 miles from London and were on our final stretch to Cape Town. Our journey had taken us through so many diverse places. Maybe it was my receptiveness to diversity having been on the road for so long, or maybe it was just the way that age allows us to appreciate the journey rather than the destination, but on that crossing I saw the Karoo as though for the first time.
I know some people love lushness and tropical fullness, but I would sooner have semi-desert than the jungle. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but there’s something about vastness and emptiness that resonates with my soul and I feel myself drawn to it as I increasingly find solace in solitude. Part of it, I’m sure, is that abundance has a way of obscuring detail, while emptiness enhances it. The Karoo, for me, strikes a near perfect balance between abundance and emptiness.
Nowadays there’s not a lot of wildlife to be seen if you’re just passing though, but it hasn’t always been that way. Less than two hundred years ago, this was home to the largest animal migration on earth, as vast herds of springbok, estimated at over 10 million individuals, trekked in search of better veld. Today, the Karoo is just a shadow of what it once was. The last recorded springbok migration was in the 1950s, when a few thousand buck moved from the Kalahari into Gordonia. With the farmers in the nineteenth century came sheep and fences. Springbok don’t cross fences. Gradually, the buck were hunted into obscurity and as their numbers dwindled, those larger predators that didn’t die out went into hiding as sheep replaced buck as the primary food source.
This is such a marginal and fragile region, with just about every life form on the knife edge between survival and extinction. It’s an arid area with frequent droughts where somehow the plants and animals evolved to survive and even prosper in the harsh conditions. Nature always seems to find a way of establishing a balance, but the introduction of sheep into such a precariously balanced ecosystem was bound to set it off kilter as overgrazing, combined with the selective diet of the sheep, took its toll to the point where today in many parts, ten hectares of veld or more are needed to sustain a single sheep. Karoo lamb, while favoured for its taste, is in such short supply that there’s not even enough to stock the supermarkets in Cape Town, the closest major city and market.
I think that sacrifice is part of life, but we should never forget what it is that we’ve lost as a result of the choices we’ve made. Where a loss has been great, we need somehow to etch it on our minds as a reminder of what once was but is no more. Unless we do this, we will lose forever the hope that we may one day regain what we have sacrificed. If we were given a choice today between a few thousand marginal farms supplying Karoo lamb to the privileged few in the country, or being host to the largest animal migration on earth, who would choose meat?
Just over three years ago, we spent a few days in the Karoo with friends and were shown a farm called Vogelfontein, by a local agent. This was at the end of a prolonged dry period and having over extended themselves, the farm owners were desperate to sell. Though we couldn’t really afford it, we scraped some cash together and became part-owners with my brother and sister-in-law.
Situated in the Northern Cape with the southern boundary on the provincial border of the Western Cape, it’s a beautiful farm with a rich heritage. Being on the escarpment, there are many ravines and even a high waterfall, though it only runs, of course, when it rains heavily. In common with much of the Karoo, the rock formations, colours, and vistas can be breathtakingly beautiful. There are no roads or other houses visible from anywhere on the farm, and the only evidence of today’s world is in the vapour trails of the jets on the flight path between Johannesburg and Cape Town.
There were many reasons for us wanting to buy this little piece of the Karoo. One was just to remove the sheep and return the land to nature, giving the naturally occurring plants and animals a sanctuary with room to exist and recover. But ultimately, my dream was to establish a refuge for us, especially for our then five year old twins, from the frenetic clutter of our life in Cape Town; Somewhere that we could go to and experience a way of life that we could juxtapose against our everyday lives and to allow the message to seep in that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Many of the relics on the farm tell the tale of a very different life and perspective to what we now have, and a time when the only resource to be had in abundance was time itself. For lack of steel, rocks were cut to make fence poles. Beaufort shale, so abundant in the region, was the staple resource used to construct stone houses, boundary walls, and dams. Large kraals, made from hand-cut, packed stone, speak of times when livestock needed to be corralled to stave off predators. I’m not particularly nostalgic by nature – in reality I love and thrive off technology and I founded and run a technology company – but I often look at our lifestyle today and try to set it against the lifestyles of previous generations in an attempt to gain insight into the price we’ve paid for they way we now live. My overwhelming feeling is that we’ve sacrificed time for material and that the more material we accumulate, the more it consumes our time in a seemingly never-ending feedback loop. The common phrase that time is money is a misnomer. The truth, I think, is that life’s most special moments are made almost entirely by giving time to allow the things that money can’t buy, to happen. If so, the paradox is that time is priceless and its true value is only realised when it’s freely given.
One of the most wonderful things about the Karoo and this part of it in particular is the night sky. In this dry area, about 1500 metres above sea level and hundreds of miles from the nearest large city, the stars at night are any star watchers dream as they literally saturate the sky. South Africa’s largest telescope (SALT) is a short distance away, just on the Fraserburg side of Sutherland, and the region is favoured to host the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – the largest radio telescope in the world that will enable us to see further into space than ever before. We always take our little telescope on our outings to the farm and are never disappointed.
But all’s not well in the Karoo. With the increasing pressure to mine the earth for ever more fossil fuels, the promise of large deposits of natural gas in the deep shales of the Karoo has become a prize too great to resist and there are several corporations with applications pending to do exploratory drilling.
I find it sickening that there appears to be no rational or moral limit to the price we’re prepared to pay for more oil and gas. Historically, we’ve always been able to get enough from relatively simple wells, but as demand and prices have increased we’ve turned to increasingly extreme and risky methods to obtain our fuel. As I write this, Shell are scaling their operations in the Arctic ocean and it seems that deep sea arctic drilling is only a matter of when as opposed to whether. This despite the certainty that a major oil spill in the harsh conditions of the fragile Arctic could be impossible to contain or recover from. Canada, formerly one of the world’s most environmentally progressive countries, has suddenly had a change of heart and abandoned all related morality as the the reality of the largest oil reserves outside of Saudi Arabia has set in and the greed from short-term tar sands profit has taken hold. The Athabasca river flows through the middle of the tar sands and drains into the fragile ecosystem of the Peace-Athabasca delta, the largest inland boreal delta in the world. It already has vastly elevated levels of carcinogenic, tar sands derived toxins, even though the scale of the current tar sands operation is just a hint of what it’s planned to be.
The fracking planned for the Karoo is no less extreme than Arctic drilling or Canadian tar sands, and in an equally fragile environment. Hundreds of thousands of wells will be drilled, each first vertically for several kilometres to reach the gas bearing shale layer, then horizontally within that layer. Up to 20 million litres of water, mixed with sand and toxic chemicals including benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene, are injected under immense pressure into each well to cause the fractures that release the gas trapped in the shale. Most of this toxic fluid gets blown back to the surface as the gas is released, where it’s retained in open earth dams. On the way down, the wells pass though the water table and steel casings are inserted into the well bore to prevent contamination of the ground water.
Quite apart from the vast use of water, there are so many modes of failure in the fracking process that it would be flattering to call it risky. Storms, floods and other natural processes can and will cause the earth dams to fail. Poorly installed casings can result in the fracking fluids being injected at high pressure into the aquifers. Even with properly installed casings, how much do we really know about the minute detail of the sub-surface geology? It only takes one small fissure linking the gas bearing shale to the aquifer, to create a bridge by which the toxins can diffuse into the ground water. Any past earthquakes, for example, could have left such fissures, just as any in future can damage the casings. There are numerous hot springs in the Karoo which span from the surface to strata several kilometres below. In the USA, about half a million wells have been drilled in the past decade and countless cases of groundwater contamination exist and have been confirmed by studies and the Environmental Protection Agency. This is no surprise at all and I expect many more to come with time. The earth is not inert and over time every single casing will fail. Of course the gas companies deny findings of contamination, but then they would; no matter what they say, aquifers polluted in this way are impossible to clean.
Coincidentally, tomorrow is World Water Day. The animals and people in the Karoo depend almost entirely on groundwater for their existence and it will be the animals, the poorer people, and future generations who will pay the highest price for the damage that fracking will do to the Karoo. In the spirit of the South African Dream, will the government uphold our constitution by taking the high road and saying no fracking, or will we go the way of Canada and sacrifice our morality for a few years of energy from the Faustian bargain that is shale gas?
My dream for the Karoo is that one day it will once again be home to vast herds of springbok, free to roam and migrate as they once did. It’s not an impossible dream, but if it is ever to be a reality it will take strong and principled leadership. My fear is that if the shale gas bargain is accepted and fracking goes ahead, the sacrifice will be complete and the dream lost forever.