[Music]
so the next three decades will determine
the future of humanity 10,000 years ago
we started a completely unprecedented
experiment which was the domestication
of nature for the service of a single
species well nine thousand and something
years later that really took off and in
the last two centuries our species has
come to completely dominate the planet
and in this next period as we approach
the full planet and the human population
is no longer growing exponentially it's
leveling off we're going into this
period of transition and the big
question is will we achieve that
gracefully or will we overshoot and
crash and burn the two things which
determine that are firstly are we going
to moderate the demands that we put on
the capacity of the earth to within its
ability to deliver and the second is are
we able to keep that capacity to provide
the things that we need to sustain life
or are we integrated so I'm a systems
ecologist Metz an ecologist who studies
ecosystems a number of years ago a big
national newspaper here in Janice burg
introduced me as an assistant ecologist
so you might like to wait till the main
man shows up until tells you what's
really going on but most recently my
co-lead the intergovernmental platform
on biodiversity and ecosystem services
their degradation and restoration
assessment around the world 300
scientists three years the numbers would
come out of that are actually both
amazing and a bit depressing only about
20% of the world
soul functions in its natural state
another 20% of the world another foot
has been completely transformed to serve
us in other words the suzelle croplands
this is our plantation forests this is
our cities in our infrastructure the
believe between the sort of three firsts
are highly modified by what we do these
are our arrangements our managed forests
and of this totality about 15% of the
world as we speak is actually quite
severely degraded we as a species are
now appropriating about a third of the
net primary production of the world
that's like nature's GDP so a third of
that is coming to us the consequence of
these transformations has been enormous
impact on the ecosystems of the world on
the forests on the rivers on the oceans
on all of those things which we depend
and for three out of five people living
in the world right now this is the most
pressing environmental issue okay it's
not about climate change it's not about
this or about that it's the fact that we
are actually damaged the ability of
ecosystems to support us and the cost of
that to the global economy is largely
impossible
counseling things like the GDP but that
impact is around about 10 percent of
when we look at South Africa the numbers
if anything are slightly more stock but
in South Africa we carry an additional
historical burden and that is of course
that when Europeans came here some
several hundred years ago they displaced
bantu-speaking people who were really
occupying the land as those men -
speaking people have displaced quiets
and people before them and as a young
democracy we are committed to the idea
of making access to the land and its
resources much more equitable than it
currently is but at the same time we
understand that what we get from the
land isn't just stuff again it's not
just what crops can we grow you know
what water can we harvest it's also that
nature has values for nature itself in
other words nature is also there to
support the other ten million species
who occupy this planet and finally
nature is an in deep deep part of our
self-identity so it's not just about
material goods it's around about our
relationship to ourselves and to the
land and as we go through this process
of land reform in South Africa we're in
a moment of huge opportunity we're also
at a moment of enormous risk you can
learn a lot from looking at an image of
South Africa taken from space the first
thing you will notice is that you can
see degradation of the land from 800
kilometers up you can see it from space
it's those bright areas you can
those are degraded the second thing to
notice is that they're not randomly
distributed in the landscape they're
clustered and some of that clustering is
because of natural reasons they are
particular soils particular climates
which are more susceptible to
degradation than others but some of
those clusters bear the human imprint
they show for instance political
boundaries nature the moon create those
we created those and one of the stock
ones in the context of South Africa's
you can very clearly see the imprint of
former policies you can see the impact
of the 1913 and 1926 land hands which
were the acts which confined black
people to living on only a certain
fraction of the land and degradation was
resulted that just as in space
degradation is not distributive Germany
over the land over the landscape so in
time degradation typically occurs at
distinct moments have occurred for
instance during our major droughts we
see a big increase in the land
degradation and then often also ties to
moments in which we alter the policy and
so the message for this is that we are
we have agency here we as humans out of
the way that the land performs and in
particularly the future of the land is
not independent of the rules that we
established around how it is used so at
this moment of land reform in South
Africa its history over the last 20 odd
years should caution us against looking
at it in a very narrow political and
legal sense only we like to frame this
discussion as a story about villains and
victims but in fact the reality is a lot
more nuanced
there are at least as many heroes as
there are villains for instance I have
an interest in botanical diversity in
the richness of plant life and we have
been fabulously rich country and I
noticed looking at the maps of richness
of South Africa there was one hot spot a
giant peak of richness in a place that I
know quite well so I tried to
investigate what was going on there
while I listened it would be described
before and it turns out to be the farm
of a man who had lived there is entire
life he was born on that farm his
parents about it before me he looked his
entire land and life on this farm he in
between raising sheep and cattle was
passionate about botany and he went out
and he collected all the plants there
and he described them at main Maitlis
and that's why there's this enormous
peak of biodiversity on that little farm
okay it's because of one man being
interested if I couldn't the class
damage defense and the important thing
is that way we relate to the land
Kaye is up to us as individuals in our
individual perception of their land the
history of land reform in recent decades
tells us that most of those enterprises
have resulted in a decrease in
agricultural productivity and an
increase in poverty of the very people
that they were supposed to benefit so
how do we turn that story around one of
the causes is a change in the
relationship that we bear to the net
what we call what Aldo Leopold nearly a
century ago referred to as the land
ethic in other words how do we see our
responsibilities towards the left do we
see it suddenly
a set of Rights of exploitation rights
that we as owners of that land an
unrestricted license to take everything
from that land to our own benefit or do
we see it in terms of a responsibility
to the broader society and to future
generations so you can think of this
evolution of a land ethic more or less
as a kind of will do towards the land so
we seem to be between an immovable
object which is the finite size of South
Africa and an irresistible force which
is their insatiable hunger for everyone
to have a slice of it the discourse
around land in South Africa has two
completely separate narratives the first
is social policy towards the land in
other words who owns the land who
occupies the land and that has a whole
set of processes that underlie it we
also have an environmental discourse
about the net about what is the
condition of the land around protection
and restoration and thus far those two
things have been completely separated so
here is my transformational proposal why
don't we make those one and the same
thing why don't we unify those two big
threads in our discussion about how the
land should be in the future of South
Africa and make them one and the same
thing with this goal to sustain and
restore the light of supporting capacity
of the land for the benefit of everyone
so we know that our activities thus far
have mostly resulted in a loss of venue
and so in a situation of a tight fiscal
and not money to go around and lots and
lots of demands it's really really hard
to justify that we should spend more of
that taxpayers money in in fact
destroying value but if we take a much
broader view again see the land not only
as this asset this financial asset but
it's also something on which we build
our culture and identity now social
capital and it's also something which
delivers value to us through natural
capital then if we can grow those social
capitals and grow those natural capitals
it's no longer a zero-sum game of
transferring wealth from one person to
another then we'll in fact growing our
total wealth and their investment of
that social investment whether it comes
from the public purpose or from the
private purse actually is an investment
and not a loss how would this actually
work in practice well there are some
precedence during the height of the
Great Depression around the world in the
1930s Franklin D Roosevelt had this idea
of using the power of the state to
employ the unemployed the desperate
unemployed in conservation works to work
on especially maintaining them and
building the natural capital in the
United States of America remember this
is at the end of the Great Dust Bowl era
they were facing serious environmental
problems and the legacy of that is with
us today a hundred years nearly later we
still see not only the physical legacy
of that investment
also the psychological legacy that they
do one of the legacies does that live
was something that was implemented here
in South Africa so one of them I think
great proud achievements of our post 94
democracy is the programs that we have
of poverty relief through building
natural cataracts is the working for
water program that working on fire
program where there were weapons program
that working on what those programs do
is they use money which is distant to
raise to relieve poverty amongst the
most disadvantaged of people by
providing short-term jobs which give
them both skills and dignity and at the
same time are rebuilding national
natural capital in the country and what
I am proposing is essentially just a
logical extension of that cap and
coupling it to the land reform process
so for instance one way you can do it is
you can make sure that the transfer
price win-win-win-win former owners are
replaced with new owners incorporates
what's the value of the natural capital
in other words if someone degraded their
land before it was transferred that
comes out of the purchase price okay and
so the takes away the incentive to do so
similarly if a person invested in the
land to sound stewardship and it was in
an excellent provision that should also
be
later in the price let's take a moment
to imagine South Africa in 2050 if we
did this kind of change in mindset that
I'm proposing firstly by that stage 80%
of South Africa will be living in cities
and that alone takes a great deal of
pressure off the land but the cities
that they live in are not the slums and
the dysfunctional situation that we have
in 2019 most people are living in
neighborhoods which in which they both
sleep and work and go to school and play
all within walking distance and those
village size neighborhoods are loosely
connected into metro poles to transport
corridors and other infrastructural
structures those neighbourhoods produce
a lot of their own electrical power
through wind and solar energy they
produce most of their waste and they
harvest most of their own water they
also grow a significant fraction of
their own food on rooftops in gardens in
allotments and many of the people who in
those cities are also engaged very
directly in the management of nature in
the countryside on the other hand
there's been enormous changes imposed on
us by climate change and most of the
arid interior of South Africa 80% of the
country is now impossible to do crop
agriculture or livestock agriculture as
a result it has gone back to being
migratory wildlife systems and far from
being a non contributor to our economy
the main economic benefits that come out
of that are wild harvested animals the
replacement for the feedlot fed animals
and apparently consumed and the
ecotourism and in a world that is full
everywhere those two products are the
highest value products that we can
generate off the land the remaining
parts of the country where we are still
able to do agriculture in the cropping
sense are managed intensively lose that
footprint is really quite small
available that is quite small but
extremely carefully and the mountainous
areas are now completely set aside for
the generation of water because then is
going to be our major constraint going
into the future
fortunately that also co-exist is very
happening with recreational use and
almost everyone even those who live in
cities are have a completely new
relationship to make people have much
more of a relationship to nature than
they even have in the past because much
of how menial work is now done by
machines so what do people spend their
time on they spend their time on
building relationships in their
community and building relationships
with nature through their little patch
that they grow in in the cities or
through the volunteers in natural areas
or through being professionals managing
the landscape so by that stage the world
will have to have achieved this
transition it will have to have gone the
countries which are on the bottom of
that graph where the people are below
the level of human achievement that we
desire of them will it have to have
moved up on to the right-hand side of
the graph but they must do so not on the
trajectory which we followed in the past
which takes us into
but completely unsustainable we need to
collectively move into that bottom right
hand quadrant now poor South Africa in
that since current position that's not
that far to go we can achieve that we
can achieve both the level of Social
Development which we desire but we can
do it in a way which allows us to
persist on this planet into the future
so I hope to live long enough to see
their future but after a lifetime spent
in the abstractions of research and the
generalities of global policy I am now
focusing much more of my attention on a
particular finite little area of the
planet these are the era Montaigne
ecosystems of South Africa the high
amounts of ecosystems of South Africa in
the words of Alan Paton in cry the
Beloved Country more lovely than the
singing Namit and so this is the small
town of orchestra in Pullman I'm gonna
wear my wife who's in the audience here
and myself have built a cottage which
has got the smallest possible ecological
footprint that we could manage it's off
the grid it does what marvelous sort of
things it's a very lovely place to learn
and we spend our time increasingly in
this location trying to first gain
knowledge about the ecosystems in that
area and bring the community along in
how we can use them sustainably and
effectively in the long term so the
final thought that I will leave you with
is that my challenge you individually to
adopt some patch of land somewhere big
or small that you care about deeply and
become custodians of it
the critical thing is you don't have to
earn it
[Applause]