The air is thick with metaphor as the rain brings relief to the South African landscape. It might not be spring, or even a South African Spring, but it feels positively seasonal as the nation watches how one species of spineless thing goes extinct and another entity rises to join the chordates — or at least to fill the gap in the food chain.
These might be dangerous times, yet the main question is whether the weather and related events will be good for the fishing. Perhaps not. The newly installed flyfisher in the Union Buildings is probably having a busy time of it clearing the gutters.
For the record though, the president should know that at least two flyfishing attorneys say an environmental protection racket is threatening the sanctity of the Constitution. It is, after all, a document built in part on the trust developed during a fishing incident in which one ordinary South African removed a fish hook from the flesh of another.
Environmental laws are not working because many of the officials responsible for developing policies and laws believe, as an article of faith, that our laws should be protectionist.
— Ian Cox
Ian Cox, one of the hair-splitters in this debate, suggests that environmental sentiment can be either conservationist or protectionist, and that while either can undermine the country’s constitutional values, it is invariably the case when the sentiment is protectionist.
Cox says while the thrust of conservation is to protect ecosystems, species and habitats for the benefit of humans, protectionism seeks to protect them from humans. The intention in the Constitution is to promote conservation so that citizens may live in an environment that is not harmful to their health and wellbeing.
"Environmental laws are not working because many of the officials responsible for developing policies and laws believe, as an article of faith, that our laws should be protectionist. That is why the draft biodiversity bill [refers to] protecting biodiversity rather than conserving it," he says.
This takes it beyond hair-splitting over the benefits of a conservationist approach to the presence of trout in the economy and the human environment. In environmental policy, a protectionist bias favours the autochthonous organism at the expense of the heterochthonous. It means that by virtue of its natural nativity, a so-called indigenous or endemic species must emerge as winner in a zero-sum game.
Besides being bad for the fishing, there is a lot wrong with the argument, which Duncan Brown polemicised in his book, Are Trout South African?. It also has a profoundly unconstitutional bias in policymaking.
The protectionist sentiment’s parallels with people contradict SA’s heterogeneity and are the kind of intellectual knuckle-dragging that rejects as evil anything associated with the country’s colonial heritage, such as flyfishing.
The main trouble with species protectionism is its proponents’ poor understanding of the role of extinction in the evolutionary process. Species go extinct every day. Some species evolve, thrive and, when conditions change, go extinct before they have been discovered by humans.
Without the cull, the herd will perish. It means the only organism deserving of protectionism is Homo sapiens. Biologist Alexander Pyron argues that "the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake (read protection) has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency. Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish."
This goes against the grain for the hand-wringing atavists who rail against modernity, growth and the technology that supposedly accelerated climate change and which now threatens jackass penguins, polar bears and Cape Town. It is a romantic hankering for an irretrievable past that ignores the lessons of evolution.
Cape Town’s water crisis is such a living, evolutionary experiment. The city’s citizens will emerge resilient and stronger. The cull, as it were, will teach them and the rest of the country how to start a long-overdue water economy.
Similarly, the lesson of the cull precipitated by former president Jacob Zuma means to teach the nation that the venal and narcissistic are the herd’s weaklings. Their type must go extinct to allow the survivors to move up the food chain. The best among them will evolve a spine — and that can only improve the fishing.
• Blom is a flyfisher who likes to write.
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