karoo

INLSA

Expect art, sculpture and sunburn at AfrikaBurn arts festival in the Karoo. About 4 000 visitors are expected to attend the festival, which will be held on Stonehenge Farm. Picture: Henk Kruger

First-timers to AfrikaBurn may be forgiven for mistaking the arts festival, which will be held in the semi-arid Karoo, for a mirage.

In fact, this year the theme for the festival is Mirage – referring to the optical phenomenon that occurs when light rays are bent to produce an illusion of water, people or moving objects. Add fire, a few mobile parties and costumed revellers and you are likely to be at AfrikaBurn 2012.

The event will be held on Stonehenge Farm, a private farm adjacent to Tankwa Karoo National Park between Calvinia and Ceres, from tomorrow to next Monday.

Tickets are sold out and no tickets will be available at the gate. About 4 000 visitors are expected to descend on “Tankwa Town”, making this year the biggest version of the festival so far.

Only ice is sold at the event. Nothing else. There is no water, no natural shade and there are no shops or boerie rolls. The camp works on a “gift economy” – giving without expecting in return.

There is no cash bar or cellphone signal and no petrol station – but there will be art. And fire sculptures. And sunburn.

There will also be loads of costumes, themed camps and mutant vehicles – mobile art that could include anything motorised: cars, bikes, couches and bars.

AfrikaBurn is a regional event based on the week-long Burning Man festival held in the Nevada desert in the US.

The festival adheres to the 10 principles of Burning Man, including the “leave no trace” philosophy, and gets its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy.

Travis Lyle, a volunteer on the AfrikaBurn communications team, said the biggest concern might be the number of participants.

“The event will have more than 4 000 people for the first time this year, but they’re mostly very self-reliant and well-adjusted, so if previous years are anything to go by, this shouldn’t be an issue,” he added.

He said an encouraging aspect has been the increase in artworks and theme camps.

Egon Tania has been hard at work on his mechanical fire sculpture at the Oude Moulen Eco Village in Pinelands.

He is working with Herman van Wyk, a blacksmith from Barrydale, who has come to the city for two weeks to help build the sculpture.

Their artworks have been created as a sequence of moving sculptures to be presented in different stages – but will stay a secret until the big burn.

Lovers can get married in Tankwa Town in a five-minute ceremony, although the marriage certificate is only valid at the festival.

The event website says AfrikaBurn is not for sissies.

See www.afrikaburn.com

ARGENTINA

The government has launched its Gas Plus programme, which promises to give a price guarantee for newly discovered gas. There are about 50 projects approved under the scheme, many of which correspond to non-conventional gas fields.

AUSTRALIA

Australia has 396tcf of technically recoverable shale gas resources, according to the EIA, equivalent to about 46% of US reserves.

Widespread fears about the effect of hydraulic fracturing on water supplies in Australia have led to calls for a moratorium on the practice in several states. A temporary moratorium is currently in place in eastern New South Wales.

Australia’s shale gas industry has grown in the past few years but is still far from becoming a major gas producer as high costs and a lack of infrastructure to access the far-flung assets remain hurdles to the industry.

Although there has been speculation that shale gas may rival Australia’s booming coal seam gas industry, experts say significant production is probably a decade away.

BRITAIN

The UK government backed the exploration of shale gas this month, nearly a year after it suspended domestic shale drilling activity when exploration work triggered small earthquakes near Blackpool.

After reviewing a report into the incident commissioned by Cuadrilla Resources, the company responsible for the work, the government published its own report which gave a provisional green light to shale gas fracking provided tighter rules on seismic monitoring and drilling surveys were implemented.

The energy ministry is inviting public comment on the report’s findings until the end of next month, after which it will issue its final ruling on the future of UK shale gas exploration.

BULGARIA AND ROMANIA

The Bulgarian government in January banned shale oil and gas exploration through hydraulic fracturing due to environmental concerns, following protests.

The government cancelled a shale gas exploration permit to Chevron at Novi Pazar field for which estimates showed reserves of 1tcf to 3.5tcf.

Romania’s shale gas industry is still at an early stage, and the country currently has no specific legislation in place and instead uses the same laws that apply to its conventional gas sector.

CHINA

China in January approved shale gas as an independent mining resource, a legal status that may allow more Chinese firms to develop the unconventional energy source.

Foreign companies would not be able to participate in the tenders but could partner with the winning Chinese firms.

The world’s top energy user could hold shale gas reserves of around 1275tcf, according to the EIA, exceeding those of the US.

FRANCE

The French government banned the use of hydraulic fracturing last year in the face of concerns about potential environmental damage.

As a result, it has cancelled several shale exploration licences with major energy companies, such as Total.

The EIA says France has shale gas reserves of 180tcf.

POLAND

Poland does not have any law relating specifically to shale gas, but it has launched work on a new tax on shale gas and other hydrocarbons, expected to be ready in the first half of 2012.

The country is pursuing unconventional gas to boost its energy security.

Its estimated shale reserves of 187tcf are Europe’s biggest of known unconventional gas and could feed domestic consumption for some 300 years. The government has awarded over 100 concessions to mainly foreign companies.

UNITED STATES

Shale gas drilling in the US (with reserves of 862tcf) is mostly regulated on a state-by-state basis.

The Environmental Protection Agency is currently studying fracking and its effect on drinking water, with a preliminary report expected this year. The final analysis will be released in 2014.

The Department of Interior also is updating rules for fracking on public lands. A few states do not allow fracking. New Jersey lawmakers recently agreed to a one-year ban on the practice, and New York has a moratorium in place.

Other states have implemented regulations to keep a closer eye on drilling until federal regulators weigh in. Many states, including Texas and Colorado, require at least some disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking.

The US has had a head start on fracking, and the impact of the industry on the rural charm of states such as Wyoming has been devastating.

Alexandra Fuller has written an achingly beautiful biography of a young man who earned his living on the fracking rigs in 2008 as The Legend of Colton H Bryant.

Colton’s story unfolds against the backdrop of how the chase for profits left ghost towns in wasted landscapes and eroded basic safety standards with devastating consequences. Despite Colton’s brave exhortation to “cowboy up” and put up with the hardships, his life came to an early and tragic end in an oil rig accident. Read the book and you get a picture of what a fracked Karoo will look like.

Fuller’s book describes the alien character of the rigs spread across the landscape, and the process of fracturing rock kilometres underground. Seismic tests have shown multiple minor tremors within a 24-hour period after hydraulic fracturing operations.

Of course, this will be old news to Gautengers, used to frequent tremors from the extensive mining systems on the Reef. But the danger is that tremors damage the concrete casings surrounding well shafts, which can result in gas leaks or seepage of fracking chemicals.

Shell, the company which has applied for a licence to explore the Karoo for shale gas, said it has the experience to deal with this, but the evidence is not so clear.

The plains of Wyoming are where an American Environmental Protection Agency study found chemicals such as benzene and tert-butyl alcohol in the groundwater around a shale gas well.

Three other sites investigated by the University of Texas did not find any evidence of groundwater contamination, but the balance of evidence seems to justify more extensive investigation.

There is a well-established environmental approach to dealing with new and under-researched technologies like fracking – the precautionary principle.

When dealing with new developments which affect finite environmental resources such as water supplies, we should err on the side of caution.

We should only deploy new technology when we have clear scientific evidence of the risks and benefits involved. Most scientists said they cannot draw firm conclusions about the long-term effects of the fracking process.

The government, as the ultimate arbiter and decision-maker on this issue, has not inspired confidence that a balanced consideration of the issue has been undertaken, and its track record raises legitimate fears about the dodgy deals that extractive industries tend to spawn.

The Department of Energy is running a black box investigation without public participation or transparency on the terms of reference or on how the gas exploration is being done.

The Department of Environmental Affairs has said “exploration could continue if a risk-averse approach has been followed”, but how much independent scrutiny has been applied to methods involved?

Our regulators should be cautious about proceeding with this. At the very least a thorough fact-based Strategic Environmental Assessment with open and transparent stakeholder engagement should be completed before a decision is made. This will ensure that the available evidence is looked at in an objective and open manner and help reassure a sceptical public that due diligence has been performed.

ONE begins to reach for the stars well before arriving in Sutherland as immediately after pulling off the N1 at Matjiesfontein, three hours’ drive from Cape Town, the road begins to wind skywards through endless shades of brown, sprinkled occasionally with yellow scrub, but few signs of life other than the occasional lonely sheep.

About 120km later, the harsh surroundings level out high up on what is known as the Karoo Hoogland and on a plateau 1550m above sea level, a rustic sign welcomes us to the little town of Sutherland, once known only for sheep farming but now fondly referred to as the land of stars and snow.

And it is the stars that have put Sutherland on the map, for just 15km out of town and a steep climb up another 250m to an even dizzier height is SALT (the Southern African Large Telescope), which attracts astronomers and the curious from all over the world.

Referred to as Africa’s “gigantic eye in the sky” by former p resident Thabo Mbeki , SALT emerges from its foundations in a rocky outcrop like a giant mushroom surrounded by smaller mushrooms, which are the conventional telescopes belonging to the US, the UK, Poland, Germany, Japan and Korea, located here because the site represents the ideal location to observe the stars.

Here, the night sky is alive with stars twinkling brighter than anywhere else due to the minimal light pollution from the sparse population, while it is seldom overcast and so is typically cold and clear for most of the year, making it the ideal location for the giant eye to observe the stars. The only other sites as perfect as this are in Chile, where a similar telescope exists, and in the Antarctic, where it would be prohibitively expensive to locate a telescope.

The run-down appearance of the exterior of the reception building belies the sophistication of the interior workings. Arriving early for our tour of SALT, we are disappointed to discover we will not be looking through the telescope itself (that is reserved for astronomers, who are strictly allocated time on the telescope) but instead we are to embark on a guided tour of the heart of SALT, perched a little further up on the hill’s highest point. We await the start of the tour by browsing through the rooms of exhibits and illustrations of the universe and individual stars.

Entering the towering dome-shaped structure of SALT is a contrast to the reception building and we gaze at the shiny, 91-segment hexagonal mirror made in Russia surrounded by a maze of equipment and a giant, circular catwalk to give access. We peer through a window into an operating room bulging with hi-tech equipment being monitored by scientists.

With its giant mirror permanently tilted to enhance observation, the telescope is able to record distant stars, galaxies and quasars a billion times too faint to be seen with the naked eye, positioning South Africa at the forefront of science and providing opportunities for young scientists in a hi-tech environment.

Our opportunity to see the stars in Sutherland comes a little later at Sterland, a resort just a kilometre from the centre of town, where Jurg Wagener has five 11-inch Celestron GPS-linked telescopes, which track objects on demand.

With eight other visitors, we gather in Wagener’s boma, protected from the lights of the occasional passing car, while the cold, clear night air envelops us. We are surrounded by stars from horizon to horizon, clearly visible to the naked eye. With a whirring sound, the first telescope focuses on an object, but even Wagener ’s introduction does not adequately prepare us for the spectacle we are about to witness.

I peer through the tiny round glass to be greeted by a mass of bright, white light, the dazzling jewel box of Scorpio, Venus and Jupiter, which is so bright I am forced to turn away momentarily. Then we move on to Capello, which is actually four stars made up of dazzling red and orange colours. Close to the Southern Cross is Alpha Centauri, which is a triple star and our nearest celestial neighbour; not far away lie the two Magellanic Clouds, our neighbouring satellite galaxies, and away from the Milky Way we peer into the cosmos towards a universe so far in time and distance that it is difficult to comprehend.

Wagener is as entertaining as he is knowledgeable and he breaks to give us a lecture on the universe and show a DVD on Sutherland before a grand finale of more spectacular stars in the boma. Although he is unassuming, Wagener may well have the mantle of Mr Sutherland for, apart from being an expert on the night sky, he is the local estate agent, owns four guesthouses, a guest farm and the campsite, as well as running a restaurant. He also conducts walking tours of the town which cannot be that taxing as, apart from the wide, clean main street, there is not very much to Sutherland.

Having said that, it’s not only the stars and SALT that bring people here. Being the coldest place in the country, it snows frequently and this and the bracing cold attract visitors, as does the vast open space and the harsh Karoo landscape, which some liken to a moonscape, with its free-roaming herds of springbok, endangered riverine rabbits and eagles.

The Dutch Reformed Church, around which the town developed, is a beautiful building even for those not interested in churches. Its pointed, rough stone and tall gabled roof give it an impressive stature, while inside it houses a huge German-designed organ that makes it worthwhile to attend a service. The church was once occupied by British troops and used as a fort during the Anglo-Boer War.

To cater for the regular visitors, there are several guesthouses, named after the stars, and a few restaurants, including Wagener’s cleverly named “Halley se komeet”. No prizes for guessing which comet this takes its name from.

• SALT, (023) 571-1205, tours are R30 a person.

• Sterland, (023) 571-1405, star gazing is R50 a person.

The Kanna Awards, informally known as the Klein Karoo Oscars, recognise productions of outstanding quality at the annual Absa KKNK which take place in Oudtshoorn each year. This year there are ten categories, each with three nominees. All productions of the official festival programme are eligible for consideration by the panel of esteemed judges made up by professionals of the arts and entertainment industry.

The 2012 Kanna panel was led by Erns Grundling, assisted by David April, Charl Bezuidenhout, Willemien Brümmer, Chrisna du Preez, Eduard Greyling, Hylton Nel, Robert Pearce, Laetitia Pople, Pieter Redelinghuys, Martjie Roos, John Theodore, Wim Vorster, Hein Willemse and Celeste Williams.

This year, the Absa KKNK festival programme offered 37 theatre productions, two dance productions, five children’s theatre shows, six literary productions and 20 visual art exhibitions. The task of selecting the nominees was a challenging one for the judges who had to spend many hours in theatres and galleries, allowing for an average of one hour per production or exhibition viewing.

“We are delighted with the success the project has received so far and we are honoured to have been recognised and nominated for the Kanna Award”, says Teresa Lizamore, curator of the project which she has presented through Artspace Gallery of which she is curator and director.

The project’s first exhibition, Ik Ben Een Afrikander (I am an African) was presented as a group exhibition at Artspace Gallery in June 2011. It received an overwhelming response from the public and in the media. Lizamore decided to expand the reach by developing a longer term project to provide a platform to further explore the issues that were raised by the first exhibition.

The project seeks to reflect the rising voices of new Afrikaans intellectuals, artists, poets and literary thinkers who have been grappling with the concept of an Afrikaner identity – one that distances itself from a shameful identity – a relic from a period from which the country has moved forward.

Says Lizamore on the reason she launched the project:

“As an Afrikaner of a certain age I was raised during Apartheid and also witnessed its downfall. Through political history, the terms Afrikaner and African have come to occupy opposite sides of an identity debate. I ask the questions, what makes an Afrikaner? It has been an interesting irony to examine the roots of the term ‘Afrikaner’. Afrikander was first uttered by Hendrik Biebow in 1707 when he was declaring his allegiance to the African continent and hence declaring himself as an African!”

Ik Ben Een Afrikander II was presented at the Stellenbosch Woordfees 2012 in March this year. The artists represented on this show were Hanneke Benade, Willie Bester, Lien Botha, Hannelie Coetzee, Johann du Plessis, Pauline Gutter, Sandra Hanekom, Marieke Kruger, Clare Menck, John Murray, Mea Ox, Henk Serfontein and Jaco Sieberhagen.

Ik Ben Een Afrikander IIl, which showed at the 2012 Absa KKNK from 31 March to 7 April is a compelling group exhibition which featured the work of visual artists Willem Boshoff, Francki Burger, Hannelie Coetzee, Pauline Gutter, Danelle Janse van Rensburg, Ruhan Janse van Vuuren, Madelein Marincowitz, Clare Menck, John Murray, Louis Olivier, Richardt Strydom, Cobus van Bosch, Engela van der Hoven, Jan van der Merwe and Reney Warrington.

As part of the project, a publication was produced and was launched at the Ik Ben Een Afrikander III exhibition in Oudsthoorn. The project will continue to explore the expanding definition of ‘Afrikaner’, and what it means to those ‘outside’ the boundaries of the definition, as well as those within- and of course what (if any) the definition of ‘Afrikaner’ actually is.

The Kanna Award winners will be announced on Sunday, 6 May, at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town.

Well over a year since Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu first placed a moratorium on exploration to assess the potential for hydraulic fracturing for gas in the Karoo, there is still a deafening silence on the matter from the government.

There is no doubt that the process of fracking, as it is colloquially known, is controversial, with concerns about the environmental impact of the chemicals used with vast quantities of water to blast at shale rock to release the gas deep underground. But the manner in which the government – in particular the Mineral Resources Department – has dealt with it has left everyone in the industry hanging.

Royal Dutch Shell, in particular, is poised to spend hundreds of millions of rand on exploration, but it is not even sure that the moratorium is still in place. In the absence of the minister saying anything about it, it is assumed the moratorium remains in place, although it was supposed to have expired by the end of February.

The last thing she said about fracking was that the report by a task team would be placed before cabinet imminently. Yesterday cabinet spokesman Jimmy Manyi said the report had not been placed at this week’s meeting of cabinet, but acknowledged that its appearance was overdue. Questions would be put to the Mineral Resources Department, he pledged.

Of course, the exploration companies themselves believe that the process will be done with the minimum of damage to the environment. It is natural that they would believe so. The Treasure the Karoo Action Group, an anti-fracking lobby group led by writer and environmentalist Jonathan Deale, believes the consequences of fracking will be dire. There is a real possibility of water being contaminated in an environment that is semi-desert, it argues. While Deale suggests tapping into alternative forms of energy, an Econometrix study commissioned by Shell argued fracking could contribute up to R90 billion in government revenue and generate 700 000 permanent jobs over 25 years.

The New York Review of Books recently begged the question: “Why not frack?”, in which author Bill McKibben argued that regulators could not keep an accurate count of the number of wells or keep up with the waste products in an environment in which the political power of the industry continued to grow. He pointed to the inauguration of a new governor of Pennsylvania, Republican Tom Corbett, who allegedly had taken more gas industry contributions than all his competitors combined. Corbett claims that regulation of the industry is too rigorous.

Here in South Africa, the DA’s energy spokesman, David Ross, argues that if the moratorium on fracking exploration in the Karoo is lifted, “the ANC could earn a fortune”. He reports that the ANC-linked Batho Batho Trust has a 51 percent stake in Thebe Investments, Shell South Africa’s local empowerment partner. Through Thebe, the trust has a 12 percent stake in Shell SA refining and a 14 percent stake in Shell SA marketing, reports Ross.

A Shell spokeswoman said it was important to understand that Thebe’s shareholding was in the downstream business – from refinery to retail – and not the upstream business of extraction, production up to refinery. “These are entirely separate businesses,” the spokeswoman said. “In other words, any funds generated from the Karoo project would not flow to Thebe or Batho Batho.”

It is not clear why the government processes are so secretive, but surely greater transparency is the way to go?

Internationally acclaimed land artist Strijdom van der Merwe’s favourite place on Earth has made an imprint on his gentle face. He spends a lot of time alone in the Karoo with its bright light, wind, dust and desolation. He loves that vast part of South Africa, which he often uses as a canvas for his unique land art — and when Van der Merwe talks about the Karoo it makes him smile, showing laugh lines that look like the furrows he makes by dragging his heel on its sandy surfaces.

“For me, the Karoo is sacred. Because it is dead quiet, you become relaxed, destressed in its laid-back tempo, and you have to live with that,” he says during a meal at Casparus Restaurant in his home town of Stellenbosch. He designed the restaurant for renowned chef Etienne Bonthuys.

Like other land artists, Van der Merwe’s gallery is the environment and, as Annali Cabano-Dempsey wrote in the prologue of his beautiful book, Sculpting the Earth, he has an “immense capability” to “capture profound moments in time and space and then to let it go — the only memory of its existence captured by the lens of a camera”.

As a full-time land artist for the past 16 years who has exhibited around the world, the thoughtful Van der Merwe’s “canvas” of choice remains the Karoo. “I enjoy it tremendously to work in the Karoo, but it is also much more difficult and that is why it is so enjoyable …

“It is like having a white canvas, but you’re allowed to only draw one line and where you draw that line and how you draw it will determine if it is a success or not. But, say, in the Knysna woods, there are so many other things that your one line will disappear in the 110?000 other trees and ferns.”

Subtle protest
Van der Merwe’s art has always been largely understated, even though it often draws attention to environmental issues such as global warming. That was until the threat of fracking in his beloved Karoo, where powerful energy multinational Shell wants to mine for shale gas in this unscathed part of South Africa.

Van der Merwe (50), who grew up on a Highveld farm, says he has never thought of himself “as an artist with a protest voice. I try and do things in a subtle way; somewhere deep down a message filters through. I guess it has to do with my personality — the fewer things I have the happier I am, the less I bother others, the better I feel, the smaller my footprint on Earth, the gladder I am. I am not a guy who wants to trumpet things.

“[The prospect of fracking] was a shock to me, because I enjoy the Karoo landscape so much … to think that this mining process can start to poison the earth and the underground water.”

A large installation in Van der Merwe’s current solo exhibition at Circa in Johannesburg, Imagine the Unthinkable, is immensely angry without him waving placards or shouting at the top of his voice.

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“The documentaries I have seen about fracking in America, for example, show that not a lot seems to happen on the surface, but there has to be a drilling process. What I tried to show with the installation is that there will be this station that will be so non-Karoo, which will all of a sudden appear, and that there will be this motion, these sounds, which are not Karoo, not indigenous, and that the sound is so alien that I wanted it to be irritating.”

The installation occupies an entire floor and is scattered with 20 small mousetrap-like contraptions, each 30cm long, 12cm wide and 12cm high, with what look like small drumsticks that keep banging irregularly from different parts of the large floor space. Each of these little machines is placed on maps of the area in the Karoo where the fracking could happen.

“I wondered whether it had to be ping-pong xylophone sounds or rather that cold sound — so I decided that it rather had to be the cold sound.

“So I created something of you standing there thinking, ‘it is this machine that has to knock, but it is actually one over there’, so you try and think ‘where next?’ and you don’t know. So you lose yourself in this landscape of alien things.

“What worked for me is that it is so flat in the gallery, with the big sky above like the Karoo, and you walk through the landscape. So what I think I achieved well — to flatter myself — was to illustrate the vastness of the Karoo in this space.”

Van der Merwe says the Circa exhibition has put him back about R30?000, “but I had such a need to do it that it isn’t an issue for me”.

He thinks a bit when asked what he wants to achieve with his land art. Then that Karoo smile with a chuckle: “Self-indulgence.” Seriously, though? “In the first place I don’t make it to impress anyone else — I guess it is a bit self-indulgent. You make it, first, because it is fantastically enjoyable, but then there are people who get joy out of it. Then there are issues when you have the opportunity to contribute and make your voice heard, like this fracking in the Karoo.

“Years ago I did something about District Six [from where black people were forcibly removed]. I put up a range of post boxes saying ‘D6 poste restante’, with the idea that we can still send letters to you who lived there — it is still your address and basis even though you’ve been forcibly removed.”

He says there is also that sense of creativity that one feels within, “so if you are a good artist you create something that didn’t exist before”.

Art for art’s sake
For a land artist, an exhibition is not necessarily a way to make money.

“Nothing has been sold on the exhibition yet. An exhibition like the one at Circa has always been an advertisement for people who then commission me for more stuff.

“After the opening, I got a call from architects who have to transform a large piece of land into a heritage park. They want the ground works to be formed into land-art shapes. It’s a massive job — they’re talking about 500 statues that represent the apartheid era — but the money isn’t there yet; it is a concept at the moment.”

The Smithsonian Africa Museum wants Van der Merwe to do an installation for Earth Day on April 22 next year. “The piece of land that they gave me to work with is 100m long and three metres wide — it is a long strip of lawn. I looked at the lawn and I thought to myself that the grass is actually artificial because it is a planted piece of lawn, but underneath the grass is the real earth. So I thought: ‘Isn’t this like Africa — on top the colonialist, but underneath the old Africa, the old cultures?’

“So, in my imagination the Europeans took the maps and stuck pins with red heads on the maps, so I am going to take 5m tall ‘pins’ every few metres, pushing back the grass like a crumpled-up serviette, making the grass look like waves and, underneath the grass, exposing the real Africa.”

Making money for this former art lecturer, now full-time artist, is a small part of his art. “I’ve always subscribed to the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi — you collect knowledge in your head and carry that with you rather than earthly belongings, because they eventually become a burden. I’ve become a person who has attached much more value to the moment.”

Some people may say that land art cannot be too difficult. “They won’t say it but they may well think it …”

Last year, Van der Merwe arranged a land art exhibition in Plettenberg Bay with some of South Africa’s foremost artists, such as Angus Taylor, Marco Cianfanelli and Gordon Froud, as well as sceptical local artists.

“So afterwards I told the local artists it isn’t like you put 10 rocks in a line, or put yellow leaves in a stack, but where you pack it or how you pack has to do with your knowledge of colour, how you use textures and perspective.

“What do you need to know about Roman columns to be able to draw lines with your heel in the Karoo?” he says with a chuckle. “You need to know about Roman columns to be able to draw lines with your heel in the Karoo!”

Strijdom van der Merwe’s Imagine the Unthinkable is on at the Circa Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg until May 12

From what I saw, fracking is too good for the Karoo

I have been doing a fierce amount of travelling between Cape Town and Durban of late. The East Coast is hungry for crystal meth and perlemoen while the West Coast is crying out for marijuana and vindaloo. It’s a lucrative trade if you don’t mind being seen behind the wheel of a bakkie. Personally, I can do without that kind of stigma.

Anyway. It was just the other day that Brenda and I and her stinking epileptic dog Julius Seizure drove from coast to coast in a Land Rover that was about as reliable as Jacob Zuma’s recall of his role in the arms deal.

Then I had to fly to Durban after my beloved Hyundai (may he rust in peace) was serviced in much the same way that a flexible Thai ladyboy on the mouth-watering buffet that is Phuket’s Bangla Road might give you a service – then have his kick-boxing boyfriend mug you on your way out.

I was back in Cape Town for a week before loading up the Landy and pointing its snout in the direction of the Indian Ocean once again.

“Oh no you don’t,” said Brenda, sawing at the wheel as I set course for the Wild Coast. “You’re not subjecting me to the Transkei again.”

The last time we drove through Mthatha, I had to use a blunt machete to hack a path through baying mobs of matric certificate-wielding youths whose angry eyes reflected the horrors of Obersturmführer Zille’s notorious Western Cape refugee camps.

• Complete column: Sunday Times

Cats: Humour, South Africa
Tags: Beaufort West, Ben Trovato, Bethlehem, Bloemfontein, Fracking, Humour, Karoo, South Africa, Sunday Times, Travel, Whipping Boy
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BRENDAN BOYLE

THERE is nothing quite like a road  trip to help one to reconnect with  the complexity and wonder that is  South Africa.

The reality of road travel might be  harsh for the tens of thousands risking  their lives in over-crowded buses to get to  the Zion Easter festival at Moria in  Limpopo or for those using long-distance  taxis to get between their family homes  and their city lives.

But whether it is in the air-conditioned  silence of a smart saloon or the rattling  din of a bus, the country comes to your  window and, if you leave it open, the  unique smells and sounds of different districts announce themselves.

Travelling back and forth between East  London and Cape Town for my firstborn  son’s wedding, I avoided most of the N2  and opted for secondary routes – and  once, by mistake, a rutted tertiary road.

In many of the places where people are  compressed, whether it is in a rural hillside village in the Eastern Cape or an  informal settlement among the farming  towns of the Western Cape, the sense of  waiting is still palpable.

People sit on makeshift seats outside  tin shacks or brick or mud houses watching time pass. Some may be keeping an  eye on toddlers at play, waiting perhaps  for the laundry to dry or listening for the  call of an ailing relative inside, but far, far  too many of them are obviously of working age, but with no prospect of regular  employment in their foreseeable lives.

The children labelled according to their  schools by their green, maroon and grey  uniforms seem more optimistic as they  head to and from their classes. There is  lots of chatter, some play with balls or  sticks and a boy walking alone might  have the makings of a better Thabo Mbeki one day.

They hope, no doubt, that the education  they are getting, no matter how poor, will  set them up for a better life than their  parents have been able to give them.

 There seems to be more purpose in the  deeper rural areas, where the homes are  further apart, but that probably reflects  nothing more than the greater challenges  of finding fuel, fetching water and doing  the small amounts of shopping a government grant makes possible.

Cattle and goats are still plentiful, but  where there are signs that crops once  grew, the fields are mostly barren.

Every so often, an island of success,  like the intensely farmed district of Kirkwood, shows what is possible.

 The work must be hard and the hours  long – this probably is not the decent  work that Cosatu speaks of – but there is  an air of purpose and productivity in  places like these.

Flying has an equivalent effect, though  more cerebral than physical. Looking  down on the vastness of the Karoo emphasises the scale of the logistical challenge to get services from, for example,  the power stations of Mpumalanga to the  car plants of the Eastern Cape – and the  cars made there to the Gauteng hub.

Descending over Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town underlines the complexity of running a city.

Try to spot the water works and imagine the job of connecting it to every  house, office and factory and then to  maintain that network, keep the pressure  up, the leakage down and the water  drinkable.

On a night approach, the web of street  lights, traffic lights, house lights and  sometimes the blazing glare of a flood-lit  sports stadium boggles the mind. We get  angry – and rightly so – when an inoperative traffic light jams the early  morning traffic, but imagine the infrastructure needed to maintain all those  lights at all those intersections and to  respond when one is reported to be off.

Whichever way you look at it project  South Africa is massive. Every day that  we don’t keep up with its escalating demands makes the task harder.

Agriculture, industry, service delivery,  education and job creation on this scale  need to be integrated if we are to have  any hope of a future that looks more like  Kirkwood than crumbling Jansenville.

The government has plans aplenty to  do just that, but without the professional  civil servants capable of project management on such a scale and committed to  rising within that mandarin class by dint  of their skills and hard work, it won’t  happen.

Being secretary general of an organisation as old and vast as the ANC requires great skill and experience of the  movement, but those are not the skills  needed to make the country work at  ground level.

Even less so are the skills that get a  cadre through the ranks from branch to,  say, provincial executive committee equal  to the job of running a hospital, a water  treatment plant or a traffic system.

That, of course, is what Nedbank chairman Reuel Khoza was talking about  when he dared to say in his annual report  what investors and the ratings agencies  that guide them are talking about more  and more in boardrooms here and  abroad.

“South Africa is widely recognised for  its liberal and enlightened constitution,  yet we observe the emergence of a  strange breed of leaders who are determined to undermine the rule of law and  override the constitution.

“We have a duty to build and develop  this nation and to call to book the putative leaders who, due to sheer incapacity to deal with the complexity of 21st  century governance and leadership, cannot lead,” Khoza said.

It is a popular fiction that any reasonably intelligent person can do any job  and that the ANC can, therefore, deploy  its loyal cadres to run important state  utilities. The party can and does deploy  people to wealth, but has less success in  deploying them to work. Khoza was himself one of the more successful ANC deployments, but now that he dares to  share the benefits of his experience, he is  dismissed as a traitor to the greater  cause.

And that is because the ANC’s greater  cause is too often not the country, but  itself.

Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily  Dispatch

HULL’S main phone and Internet provider insists it continues to offer “Britain’s best value call plans” – despite a price increase.

KC, which has more than 100,000 customers, says although prices will rise in June, people are still getting a good deal.

1. ?

   CHANGES: Nick Thompson, of KC. Picture: Simon Renilson

Letters will this week be sent out to all KC Talk customers informing them of a 50p price hike per month on their line rental.

There will be a £1.50 price rise for customers on older Karoo packages, however customers on the phone and broadband bundles will not be affected.

The company is also withdrawing all of its broadband services which offer speeds of 2Mbps or less.

Nick Thompson, KC’s director of consumer services, said: “These are modest increases that apply just to our call-only plans and older broadband services that have been superseded by much faster packages.

“The increases are less than the rate of inflation.

“Our customers will continue to enjoy Britain’s best value call plans.

“We’re the only UK home phone provider to give customers free local calls 24/7.”

KC told the Mail it expects an increase in the number of calls from customers after it released the details of its price increases, but said it encourages people to get in touch with its Hull call centre, so they can advise them.

The company often comes under fire for having a “monopoly” in the city because other providers including Sky, Virgin and BT choose not to operate in Hull.

Other companies advertise joint bundles for TV, internet and phone lines nationally, however these are not available through KC.

Customer Colette Tallett- Blenkinsop, of Hull, said: “It’s very unfair that we are the only place in the country where we don’t have a choice of suppliers.”

Karoo customer Dan Husband, 24, of Chanterlands Avenue, west Hull, said: “I’ve never had a problem with KC and their technical support is good too.

“The price increase isn’t that bad really.”

KC accepts its prices are perceived as expensive but said in comparison with other providers, its stand-alone line rental costs cannot be beaten.

KC’s cheapest monthly line rental is £12.99, compared with BT’s cheapest which is £14.60 per month.

Mr Thompson said: “People do feel we are more expensive but when you compare prices for line rental, we are the best value in the country.

“We are transparent about what we charge and there are no hidden costs.”

The price rises come a year after the last price increase.

• Hull internet provider Unique Comms relocates to city centre site

Mbalula’s emissions of flower-scented hot air should be harnessed with an array of steam turbines installed on the lawn of his ministerial residence. With just one Butheleziesque speech and one press release a day – and he’s capable of much more – Bra Fiks could banish the threat of load- shedding this winter.

Any surplus power generated could be sold to neighbouring economies. Such an innovation would concretise the ANC’s dream of a developmental state in its purest form.

This idea came to me while reading Mbalula’s recent missive to the media about the Nations Cup budget stalemate. The statement runs to 1331 words, including such delicious ones as “modalities”, “spheres”, “crescendo”, “aforementioned”, “emanating” and “undying”. (When he gets time, Mbalula should bash out a Mills Boon novel set in a government department. I’d buy it.)

One interesting earlier passage refers to the swapping of hosting rights with Libya: “It was serendipitous that South Africa was never going to host the Africa Cup of Nations 2017 as a result of the violence and civil unrest that engrossed North Africa and Libya, particularly.”

(Translation: Luckily, the Libyans were too preoccupied with getting killed to host the tournament in 2013.)

And a bit later: “Safa had approached the ministry to consider this request favourably and we have indeed done so and committed to do everything possible to support Safa in the interest of football, and most importantly out of our deep humanitarian convictions and solidarity with our fellow African men and women.”

(Translation: Listen, we’re latter-day Kwame Nkrumahs, so stop being so pedantic about who’s paying.)

Many respected scholars agree that Mbalula’s essay contains the following core message: “The government hasn’t yet underwritten the cost of the Nations Cup. Now everybody must stop talking about this issue, or else I will personally come to your home and deliver an after-dinner speech!”

But there is some dissent over the true substance of Mbalula’s warning to any officials who talk to the media, because it is exquisitely vague, as any good threat should be: “Any person or structure or body that ignores this message will be acting outside government processes and for that, we all know, there are dire consequences for the implicated or affected party.”

This part worries me, because I act almost exclusively outside the aforementioned government processes, and this is the first warning I’ve received of the dire consequences thereof. Am I an “implicated or affected party”, or both, or neither? Speaking of which, am I a person or a structure or a body?

I probably knew before reading Mbalula’s statement, but now I’m not sure. Spend 10 minutes with Fiks and the very foundations of your identity begin to crumble. Such is the terrible power of sublime nonsense.

A CONSTITUTIONAL Court ruling last week that holders of mining rights in certain provinces cannot mine until the land has been zoned, in effect puts on hold any proposed “fracking” in the Karoo, environmental lawyers said yesterday. This is even if Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu grants applications for prospecting or mining rights.

SA’s large untapped shale gas resources — estimated to be the world’s fifth-largest at 485-trillion cubic feet — under the ecologically sensitive Karoo cannot be explored to determine economic viability without using hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a controversial gas extraction method.

Several petrochemical companies have applied for exploration rights, sparking intense debate across the country.

If Ms Shabangu lifted the moratorium on fracking, and granted fracking applications, no exploration or production could occur in provinces where the Cape Land Use Planning Ordinances applied until the land had been appropriately zoned, said Justin Truter, an environmental lawyer and director at Werksmans Attorneys.

“To complicate matters even further for the exploration companies, it is ordinarily only the landowner that can apply to rezone his property, although the relevant ordinances do also provide for rezoning at the instance of the local authority or provincial authority, subject, obviously, to proper stakeholder and public participation and potentially also compensation,” he said.

Derek Light, who represents about 300 landowners in the Karoo who are opposed to fracking — including businessman Johann Rupert and Princess Irene of the Netherlands — and Agri Eastern Cape, said that the court ruling was “wonderful” and “a big step forward for us”. The petrochemical companies have applied for exploration rights over about 220000km² of the Karoo, and the landowners represented by Mr Light own a “sizeable portion” of that land, he said.

“We’re talking thousands of square kilometres … one client alone owns 35000km²,” he said.

Fracking has been banned in almost 100 places across the world, including six countries. The process was linked to two minor earthquakes in England this month.

“Companies will have to see if a group of landowners will allow rezoning, or apply to amend the zoning law,” Mr Truter said.

This would require extensive public participation that was “likely to be opposed at every corner”, otherwise they would have to apply to expropriate land, which would mean proving that doing so was in the public interest, he said.

Natural gas has been hailed worldwide as a replacement fuel for coal. The integrated resource plan for electricity has proposed that gas contribute up to 6% of all new electricity generation.

Democratic Alliance water and environmental affairs spokesman Gareth Morgan said the Constitutional Court’s decision was “a victory for decentralised planning”.

But he said he was concerned that the geographic size of individual gas exploration and production licences might have “severe impact on municipalities’ integrated development plans. The court has now confirmed, quite correctly, that there are shared responsibilities between different spheres of government when it comes to planning and zoning.”

blaines@bdfm.co.za

I HAVE been doing a fierce amount of travelling between Cape Town and Durban of late. The East Coast is hungry for crystal meth and perlemoen while the West Coast is crying out for marijuana and vindaloo. It’s a lucrative trade if you don’t mind being seen behind the wheel of a bakkie. Personally, I can do without that kind of stigma.

Anyway. It was just the other day that Brenda and I and her stinking epileptic dog Julius Seizure drove from coast to coast in a Land Rover that was about as reliable as Jacob Zuma’s recall of his role in the arms deal.

Then I had to fly to Durban after my beloved Hyundai (may he rust in peace) was serviced in much the same way that a flexible Thai ladyboy on the mouth-watering buffet that is Phuket’s Bangla Road might give you a service – then have his kick-boxing boyfriend mug you on your way out.

I was back in Cape Town for a week before loading up the Landy and pointing its snout in the direction of the Indian Ocean once again.

“Oh no you don’t,” said Brenda, sawing at the wheel as I set course for the Wild Coast. “You’re not subjecting me to the Transkei again.”

The last time we drove through Mthatha, I had to use a blunt machete to hack a path through baying mobs of matric certificate-wielding youths whose angry eyes reflected the horrors of Obersturmführer Zille’s notorious Western Cape refugee camps.

“This time,” said Brenda, “we’re taking the civilised route.” What? We’re going via Paris and Rome? Apparently not. To her, “civilised” meant Beaufort West, Bloemfontein and Bethlehem. I was immediately suspicious of a route on which all the major towns began with B. I balked and whinnied like a highly strung racehorse but Brenda put her foot down. Once I had detached her stiletto heel from my instep and doused the wound with tequila, it was my turn to put my foot down.

By the time we reached the freeway we were trundling along at a cracking pace. With a top speed of 90km/h, I anticipated that we would arrive in Durban just in time for Christmas.

We were about to penetrate the Huguenot Tunnel with the same exuberance that the English settlers once penetrated the Huguenots when I noticed that the engine was running hot. The temperature gauge loitered with intent on the outskirts of the red light zone but I couldn’t tell Brenda for fear of setting off another spectacular series of mechanical and matrimonial breakdowns.

Then I remembered an old trick my father once taught me. If you’re hot, drink half a pint of anti-freeze. There was no reason it wouldn’t work on an overheating motor. After all, what is the human body if not an engine, albeit one designed by a raving lunatic out of his skull on powerful hallucinogenics?

I pulled in at a garage and had a couple of hits on a bottle of Total’s finest summer coolant, then poured the rest into what I assumed was the radiator. There were no problems after that. We both backfired a couple of times, but I blamed the dog.

Brenda seemed impressed with the Karoo and made little murmuring sounds whenever we drove past one of its many magnificent features. Like a penis-shaped rock. Or a tree that had given up and slumped face down in the gravel.

From what I saw, fracking is too good for the Karoo. Not even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would ride across this godforsaken landscape without travel insurance or medical aid.

Beaufort West was unremarkable apart from its sullen, troll-like inhabitants. Where most towns have a sign welcoming visitors, Beaufort West has a billboard warning that it is a criminal offence to have sex with children. What a delightful place. I think I shall spend my summers here.

I spotted a charming cottage down by the railway. The yard was full of colourful characters enjoying a drink and a chat. A few of the men were playing some sort of traditional game. Brenda said it was a knife-fight.

Next stop, the magnificent metropolis of Bloemfontein. Or, as white people don’t call it, Mangaung. When the president is toppled from his increasingly precarious and yet oddly impregnable ivory tower later this year, it will become an adjective. “I have been well and truly mangaunged,” one might say upon stumbling into a trap set by one’s closest friends.

Brenda had booked us into what she described as a “cute self-catering cottage” on the fringe of the city. Bloemfontein doesn’t have a fringe. It is the fringe. And the cutest thing to ever come out of Bloemfontein is Os du Randt, so I wasn’t altogether surprised when we arrived at what looked like something the Boers might have built for British prisoners of war.

It was located near a river the colour of rotting plutonium and surrounded by a high-voltage fence. When I asked the owner about this, he smiled and said: “To keep the wild game out.” Just then, a small group of wild game came walking past, talking and laughing among themselves. The owner gave me a knowing look, which wasn’t easy because I could see in his eyes that he knew very little about anything.

Perhaps it will catch on. After all, euphemisms are hellishly hard to prove in court.

The cottage was designed by one of those murderous munchkins who trained at the Lilliputian School of Architecture, and could only accommodate Brenda, a six-pack and one of my legs.

Julius Seizure went exploring and made it as far as the electric fence. I had no idea dogs could scream. He smelled like something from a North Korean braai so we smeared him in cranberry sauce and had him for lunch. No we didn’t. We locked him inside and went off to find the legendary Bloemfontein waterfront.

It was spectacular, if you like your shopping malls to resemble East German airports. My best was the parking garage, which had clearly been designed by two blind alcoholics and a goat. And everyone seemed to be in a tremendous hurry to get away from something. Each other, probably.

A report on the full implications of fracking for SA was meant to be submitted to cabinet by March 31, but the department of mineral resources has not responded to an inquiry about the status of the report. Its findings will determine whether exploration licences will be granted. Most industry players expect that they will be.

But Havemann Inc director Luke Havemann, who is acting on behalf of Treasure the Karoo Action Group, says if government doesn’t slow down the process, it could strengthen the anti-frackers’ legal argument for halting the process.

The SA National Environmental Management Act states that where there may be harm to the environment, a risk- averse and cautious approach must be taken — what is globally known as the precautionary principle.

Havemann says that given the questionable scientific confidence around fracking (evident in the continuing debate), the granting of licences would be premature.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing a study to determine the link between fracking and water contamination, but the results will be released only in 2014. Though the EPA’s findings couldn’t be translated directly to SA (they are very different geographies), Havemann asks: “How can (SA) do in four months what the US is doing in four years?” SA also lacks any sort of regulation for the industry — for example, how to treat and dispose of the toxic waste water.

Shell SA general manager for upstream Jan Willem Eggink says: “There’s no reason to have regulation now about activity that will happen in years — there is time to develop regulation.” The exploration phase could take up to nine years.

Speaking from a US perspective, Michael Jacobson, associate professor at Penn State’s School of Forest Resources, says having regulations in place is critical, but since this technology is relatively new the regulations are evolving. The “regulate as you go along” approach was taken in Pennsylvania. “When do you decide you have addressed the precautionary principle? It’s really a policy call.”

Eggink says the challenges can be mitigated through standards and strong, transparent regulations.

But even in the case of “perfect regulation”, says Havemann, SA lacks the capacity to enforce compliance. For example, 79% of SA’s Blue Scorpion (water police) posts are vacant.

“Regulatory capacity and some solid regulations are a prerequisite,” says Jacobson.

The private nature reserve of Bergplaas, set high above the plains of the Camdeboo in the Sneeuberg Mountain range, seems to have an entirely unique climate. Driving up the snaking pass from the baking flatlands of the Karoo, I felt the air cool as I watched the altimeter rise and the Celsius drop on the thermometer of my 4X4.

I had been cautioned ahead of time about the weather by Wayne Maspero, the head ranger, but in the sweltering heat of Johannesburg I couldn’t really take his advice to heart.

“Even in the peak of summer, we have convection currents up here that draw moisture from the elevated valleys. It’s what gives this place its sense of mystique: a radiant sky can be darkened by dense storm clouds in less than an hour. So come prepared!”

As the track narrowed and became tougher to navigate, I changed down into a low gear, and considered where this path was taking me. I was on my way to meet a bona fide princess, the custodian of 7000 hectares of pristine Karoo wilderness.

“The Princess of Bergplaas”, I chuckled to myself as my car bounced over the dongas and ruts that were becoming increasingly deeper as I ascended the pass. But, this Royal of the Camdeboo is in fact the younger sister of Her Majesty, Queen Beatrix of the House of Orange, the presiding monarch of the Netherlands.

Princess Irene van Lippe-Biesterfeld is a nature lover in the truest sense of the term. In the Nineties, when she initially purchased the three adjoining farms to create the expanse that is Bergplaas, she’d spent 6 months of every year here for five consecutive years.

This was long before she had established her nature retreat programme, Spirit of the Wild, with all the accompanying staff and their families that now live on the farm. Much of her time was spent alone, deliberately so, walking the ridges, peaks and riverine kloofs, discovering the silence of this vast open land that makes up an estate very unlike any other noble’s in Europe. Previously used for farming, she bought the land in order to let it lie fallow and return to its natural state.

“You’ll be staying up at Hill Ccottage. There’s firewood there for you. Dinner is at Irene’s house at 7:30pm. Bring a torch.”

Maspero is cut from the cloth of cowboys and rangers of old. He doesn’t waste his words, his language is to the point. That he looks like a lithe ironman athlete only serves to endorse the persona. He manages Bergplaas with his wife, Cindy, who was bush-born and bred in Zambia. Together with their young daughter they have made a life of relative seclusion. The Princess has invited Cindy’s retired parents to live on Bergplaas too, which means that there is connection to three generations of family, giving comfort and support to an otherwise isolated existence.

There is a warm, respectful and humorous informality at Bergplaas. Her Royal Highness is simply referred to as Irene. She balks at decorum, wants the conversation honest, clear and direct. It’s possibly why the Masperos have fitted in so easily to life on the farm. 

It’s 7:30pm on the mark, and I step up on to the stoep of the Princess’ farmhouse. I can’t help but reflect on how the English part of my ancestry would always emphasise punctuality – or any form of fine manners – with a threat that otherwise we children would never have tea with the Queen.

I try to push that thought from my mind, imagining myself over-reaching and spilling the tea all over the floor. Outside her front door I look around and get an immediate sense of the Princess’s aesthetic. The house is spacious, rustic, designed by Irene and hewn from rock and wood. It carries grace in its simplicity. In form, its not the palace one imagines a princess to live in. No twirls, no crystal chandeliers. But there is a gentle, certain gravitas here, which reflects the lineage and genes of the one whose home this is.

She opens the door (no servant in sight), and smiling broadly ushers me in out of the chilly night air, welcoming me with a delicate hug. “It’s cold, isn’t it? Come in, come in, how was the drive up?”
She’s dressed in a tracksuit, casual jumper and well-worn sneakers. Her eyes are kind, and yet I am to learn how much she has experienced over the decades to arrive at what must have at one time seemed like an impossible peace.

Born in Soestdijk Palace just before the imminent World War ll, in the hope of a non-violent solution her parents chose to name her after the Greek goddess of peace. One of her godparents was Queen Elizabeth. She was not yet a year old before she fled with the entire royal family to England. As they were leaving Holland on a British warship, a fierce German air raid bombed the port, almost decimating the family.

Irene was placed in a gasproof carrier to protect her from possible chemical warfare. The family were forced to take flight again during the London Blitz, and went further afield into exile in Ottawa, Canada, where she spent several years of her youth. Interestingly, her grandmother, Queen Wilhelmina, named the Royal Dutch Brigade that fought alongside the Allies after Princess Irene.

Her family life included a fair share of excitement and intrigue. She studied Spanish and became proficient enough to serve as an official interpreter. After moving to Madrid, Irene met and married Prince Carlos Hugo of Bourbon-Parma of Spain, which was not a traditional coupling within Europe’s royal families: Protestants don’t usually marry Catholics.

With much consideration on the religious import of this decision, and its spiritual relevance for – Irene beyond marriage – Irene converted. This caused some upset within the nobility, but created turmoil for much of the country. It was a signature act for Irene: she is entirely independent in how, where and with whom she chooses to live her life.

Irene and Carlos were involved in a political revival movement promoting democracy, which resulted in her spending years gaining experience as a political activist against fascist Franco Spain. She and Carlos had four children together, later divorced, and he passed away a few years thereafter.

She then moved to Switzerland, which is her current European seat, and it was there that she first started re-experiencing something she had retained from her childhood: an integral view of nature, and our place as humans within it.

“We forget”, she explains to me as we sit around her candle-lit dinner table with the Masperos, “that we are woven into the natural world. Our intellect convinces us that we are a separate entity, that we need to control nature to the point that we suffocate the very earth under our feet. There are so many things that we have no right to take from these ecosystems that give us life, and especially not in such quantities.”

These are not the light words so often expressed by fashionable eco-warrior-wannabes. Irene has several forces at work within her, which provide her with a certain authority on this issue: she has delved deeper than most people I know in this field into a genuine space of communion with nature. Months of time alone in the Swiss mountains and deep in the Karoo, year after year, have given her a rare understanding of place.

She is also well read on the subject of our natural world, applying her mind to both the spirit and the sciences of fauna and flora. In 1995 she published her first book, Dialogue with Nature, which led to her writing several others on related topics.

Through her organisations, her work has gained traction over the years, including NatuurCollege Foundation in the Netherlands, and the NatureWise Foundation, a non-profit organisation that brings primary school pupils into direct contact with nature.

Irene channelled her activism experiences into her campaigns for nature. It seemed she had evolved from a position of intense independence to that of a broader, deeper interdependence.

The Masperos had invited to me to attend Bergplaas’ flagship week-long intensive programme called Spirit of the Wild, something the Princess developed during her long retreats there. Spirit of the Wild offers subsidised courses to nature guides, field rangers and environmental educators to interact with an ecosystem in a way that no accredited college, technikon or university offers.

“Nature guides, almost anywhere in the world, have a great sense of the biological world. They can recite a litany of botanical or zoological facts, and present them to guests or their students as if life is made up of chemical compounds and scientific terms. In part, all of that is true,” she says.

“But what of cultural knowledge systems? What about the spirit of the place, the rocks, the plants, the animals? Besides the fact that a zebra is an ungulate that gives birth to a foal every 12 months, what did it symbolise to the first nations? And how does it resonate for you – standing 30 feet away, watching as it grazes? And is the ephemeral or ‘soft’ knowledge even valuable in our modern world? I believe it is. More than ever.” 

Does that sound tree-hug-ish? One might think so, but not after there has been a collective response over years of positive feedback from the very nature guides who received Spirit of the Wild training. It’s been so beneficial that SANParks chose to accredit the course and offer it as one option (of several) to their rangers.

But it’s her conviction on this issue that drives home her point. We are too disconnected from the earth. Some of our technologies and most of our energy needs are causing irreversible damage and, if not irreversible, then at least with recovery periods that span over centuries.

Irene feels that “we have separated ourselves from the natural world to the extent that human society has lost its ‘balance’. This has resulted in the many crises we are experiencing today.”

This brings me to another force that drives her: the issue of shale gas mining, or fracking, and her relationship to the ‘Royal Dutch’ part of Shell Oil’s full title. She explains that while her family did indeed seed Royal Dutch Shell, neither she nor any of her family holds shares in the company today. I learn that once an entity has the term ‘Royal Dutch’ preceding it, that’s how it remains, regardless of the royal family’s onward shareholding. In fact, Irene is unequivocal in her anti-fracking position.

“Can you imagine,” she says, eyes wide as she presents a scenario, “that if Shell or any other prospector were to find shale gas under any tract of land in the Karoo – privately owned, government or municipal commonage – they could mine.”

She’s referring to the law that states that landowners only own the surface of their land, not the mineral rights beneath. “Should a fissure occur in the well, and the toxic cocktail of chemicals and shale gas escapes into the water table, as has happened too many times in other parts of the world, the water table would be poisoned. The impact on the land and the ecosystem is unthinkable. And there would be no recourse.”

It’s not only the Camdeboo she’s concerned about – it extends beyond the Karoo. Princess Irene is not alone in her view that shale gas mining is a toxic industry, and while it has a potentially vast offering in terms of energy, the repercussions of things going wrong are too severe to consider. The shale layer is too deep, it requires far too much water to pump down the wide shafts in order, through pressure, to fracture the shale that releases the gas.

And it’s not like the energy producers are instilling confidence either. Considering the environmental disasters they inflict, the stakes are precipitous.

The Princess’ perspective is that there should be a longer view, one with a more concerted focus on innovative, clean technologies, which  rely more heavily on natural forces. If properly harnessed, and established at scale, wave motion turbines, solar, wind, water and other green-tech industries, situated closer to the distribution grid and therefore closing the loop of local energy independence, could eventually satisfy much of the needs of our materials economy.

This is when Irene and the Masperos share with me their new project for Bergplaas – a version of Spirit of the Wild, but for business leaders.

“Picture people who power economies coming up here to step back, take a breath and just sense what its like to blend with the wild,” says Cindy.

“We have no cellphone reception up here. Our water comes from underground springs – most of our evenings are lit by fire or candlelight. If we keep silent, we are met by the rich, soft sounds that life offers up. Often we experience animals coming right up to the homesteads – not because they are tame or that we feed them, but because we don’t pose a threat.”

She continues, “We are surrounded here by the true colours and textures of our world. It’s so important for people, especially those who move through their days at 300 miles an hour – society’s decision-makers – to slow right down and make contact. To relate to the earth. ”

It’s a repeat on the same theme: 7,000ha of dedicated grasslands, valleys, mountains and rivers, allowed to lie fallow for their own benefit and in order to provide value to those who discover this paragon of life in balance.

Princess Irene bought Bergplaas for what she feels is a greater ideal. In her experience, the wilderness acts as a mirror. Through this reflection, people are offered an opportunity to rethink their place in the great ecosystem of the earth.

“We cannot delay on this sort of introspection much longer: being integral to nature, humans have a responsibility toward the wellbeing of all that live on the planet. What we do to her, we do to ourselves. It’s that simple.” DM

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Photo: Princess Irene van Lippe-Biesterfeld of the Netherlands at home in the Karoo.

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CAPE TOWN — The government’s decision on whether or not to proceed with the extraction of shale gas in the Karoo through hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) would be credible only if the African National Congress (ANC) derived no indirect benefit from it, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said yesterday.

The DA claimed the ruling party stood to earn a “fortune” from fracking through the donations it received from the Batho Batho Trust, of which it is the sole beneficiary. The linkages between the ANC and Batho Batho meant that the government, as the regulator, could be compromised in performing its tasks as it could be both player and referee.

Batho Batho has a 51% stake in Thebe Investments, Shell SA’s empowerment partner, and thus has an effective 12% stake in Shell SA Refining and 14% in Shell SA Marketing, DA deputy energy spokesman David Ross said yesterday.

“Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe recently indicated that Chancellor House — the ANC’s investment arm — should divest its shares in companies that gain from government tenders. In the same spirit, the Batho Batho Trust should withdraw its investment from Thebe,” Mr Ross said.

He said if SA was to benefit from its gas reserves “in a manner that is economically, socially and environmentally sustainable, it is necessary that the overseer does not stand to benefit”. “Only then can South Africans have faith that – if the moratorium is lifted – shale gas will be exploited in a responsible manner,” he added.

But government spokesman Jimmy Manyi described the allegations as “very wishy-washy” and unsubstantiated speculation. The government had nothing to do with Batho Batho’s donations to the ANC, he said, adding: “This is all so far-fetched it is not funny.”

Mr Ross, however, stressed the need for all conflicts of interests to be dispensed with if the risks associated with fracking, such as the contamination of fresh ground water, were to be managed appropriately. Regulatory oversight would be critical.

“The political relationship between Shell and Thebe Investments has already made a mockery of the due diligence process to be followed in ascertaining to whom the Petroleum Agency of SA should grant fracking exploration rights,” Mr Ross claimed.

Batho Batho Trust chairman Kenny Fihla was recently reported in a Sunday newspaper as saying that the trust’s donations to the ANC were in line with its specific transformation agenda. “We make no bones about the fact that we donate to the ANC — precisely because the trust was established by the president of the ANC at the time ( Nelson Mandela),” Mr Fihla said.

ANC politician Chris Nissen — the spokesman for the Karoo Shale Gas Community Forum — has also been active in mobilising support for fracking in the Karoo.

ensorl@bdfm.co.za