The Price of “Progress”

We tend not to realise the true cost of development until it’s too late. Rupert Koopman laments the fact that, as you read this, someone out there is busy with a tractor, brush cutter, lawnmower or bulldozer, making the world a less interesting place than it used to be.

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I cried for the first time in 2003. Working in South Africa’s smallest and most threatened vegetation type (Lourensford Alluvium Fynbos) at the height of the expansion boom in Gordon’s Bay was an emotional roller coaster, with the cart mostly hurtling downhill.

I was documenting the incredible variety of beautiful fynbos while it was being chipped away by rapacious developers who had figured out that it was cheaper to bulldoze their plots illegally than proceed through an environmental authorisation process with an uncertain result. As I returned from another tense meeting to see tractor-induced dust plumes rising from a plot next to Harmony Flats Nature Reserve, that sunny December afternoon had just proved to be too much.

They say you need to know something before you love it and, having had the thrill of finding a formerly unrecorded species every time I visited that reserve and its adjacent plots, I had grown to know and love this beleaguered piece of land. Returning to the area now, it is quite something to note that the flowers that used to offer clues to the past fynbos wealth scattered throughout the adjacent neighborhoods have been replaced with lawns and pansies.

For environmentalists the world over, Easter Island is a classic cautionary tale. The Twitter version is “Prosperous civilization’s obsession with big statues leads to overuse of natural resources, then ecosystem & societal collapse and cannibalism. LOL”.