The decline of the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency’s 17 provincial nature reserves has a profound existential implication for the province which is under the pressure of a number of heavy mining applications in sensitive environmental areas.
According to the local Green Ripple public interest group’s Kevin Harris: “Our way of life in the Eastern Cape is rarely about heavy industry. People here have had a very hard time serving as a labour resource for highveld miners and many have returned destitute, without much pension and sick.
“They have heard what UN ambassador and movie star Leonardo DiCaprio said as he flew over the smashed-earth tar sands in Canada. ‘It looks like Mordor.’ This is a land of smoking ruins and violence. A wasteland.
“We are arguing that people see the natural beauty of our province, especially in the eastern half with the Wild Coast and East Coast, and our spectacular southern highveld, as prime real estate,” Harris said.
“Our stunning, wild province’s stupendous coastline’s rich biodiversity and unique ecosystems aren’t just pretty scenery — they’re the core asset.
“Like owning a high-yield property with reliable, long-term tenants who pay rent year after year without destroying the building.
“Eco-tourism, in which our provincial nature reserves are an integral part, works exactly like that.
“Visitors come to experience the untouched parts of the Wild Coast, East Coast and Sunshine Coast, the beaches, the estuaries, the riverine forests, the marine and coastal wildlife, and the cultural heritage of life lived by the sun and moon.
“They spend money on transport, lodges, guides, local crafts and food.
“This income can flow indefinitely, as long as the natural environment — the capital — stays healthy.
“The ‘tenant’ (tourism) must look after the property because its success depends on it remaining attractive and intact.
“Generations of locals can benefit through jobs, small businesses and community growth — forever, if managed right.
“It is done in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi, Greece, France, the Seychelles, and the Western Cape.
“But the current approach in the SA and provincial tourism master plans lumps this sustainable, free asset capable of yielding an 80% or more return per annum, together with a multibillion-rand, odious debt-laden oil and gas exploration and heavy industrial development, commodity corridors, and big new roadways that fly through the province, barely touching sides.
“It’s like buying that valuable property for its strong rental income, then smashing significant parts of the building to dig for quick resources, building factories in the garden, and running heavy trucks through the living room.
“You evict the good tenant who was paying steady returns, trash the place, and somehow expect the returns to keep coming — or even get better.
“In the Eastern Cape government, two activities do not belong in the same investment portfolio.
“Economic development should be separated in a different department to environmental affairs and tourism.
“In fact, it is our view that the only reason environment and tourism is there is to control and crush their opposition to what seems to be passing as “economic development” these days — an addictive obsession with extractive industries like oil, gas and large-scale mining.
“These offer short-term gains for a narrow group — often big companies and a limited number of high-skilled jobs.
“Once the resources are taken out, they’re gone.
“The damage they leave behind for us to clean up — polluted water, scarred land, disrupted wildlife, public hurt and anger and the erasure of natural appeal — is permanent.
“You can’t restore the magic that drew tourists in the first place. There is no environmental affairs or tourism to speak of.
“Tourism, done properly with real eco-focus, is renewable. The asset renews itself every season.
“The beaches, mountains, and biodiversity keep producing value without being used up.
“It spreads benefits more widely across communities and can grow steadily for decades or centuries.
“In the place of ferocious, rapacious, short-term, destructive capital and forever wars, we have ‘forever capital’ and a peaceful, productive, healthy economy.
“Mixing heavy extraction with eco-tourism isn’t smart asset management — it’s high-risk gambling with the province’s most valuable long-term inheritance.
“We should protect and invest in natural assets as the foundation for infinite, sustainable returns, rather than risking them for finite, destructive gains that mainly benefit outsiders in the short run.
“The Eastern Cape deserves a clearer strategy that recognises these are different asset classes with very different futures.
“The private partnership participation model requires the right of partners in the community or business sector to operate and manage a plan.
“Government needs to release its grip on a sector it has been unable to protect, develop or control.
“We need to see a return to people doing what they know is the right thing, and for officials to respect, protect and unify that process.
“We need to see tourism projects set up by the people for the people.
“We suspect there is also a very low level of skills available among those in our government tourism offices and there needs to be progress away from officials acting in a gatekeeper role, to one where they become a partner who believes in the process and wishes to enable success of the stated goals, rather than to exert control by open or devious intent.”
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