Veld fire devastation continues unabated

Environment
In July, I bemoaned the hideous devastation taking place daily all over our city’s green belts as a result of set fires, with “before” and “after” photos of just such a greenbelt where I’d taken Mountain Clubbers hiking through the bush close to their own back yards.

 

Since then, I’ve been to South Africa and back, and, continuing three times a week on my bush running adventures on the outskirts of Greendale, through the Chisipite and Greendale vleis, the Grange, Gletwyn, Mandara, Chikurubi, Donnybrook, Cleveland and Mabvuku areas, have been further appalled, as this wholesale, careless and wanton fire destruction has devastated yet more hitherto pretty, well-wooded bushveld.

 

Without doubt, these fires have also burned alive, many more living creatures, already woefully lacking habitat in which to forage or hunt, stay safe, and raise their next generation.

Most of these city greenbelts are also wetlands. Most of them are also “islands” of natural bush surrounded by development. Small animals living in them often have nowhere else to go, and some of these islands of greenery actually contain rare and endangered birds and plants which we will lose if we lose their small patch of habitat.

Our city’s precious wetlands are being relentlessly and systematically ruined because those who break the law, dumping their rubbish, ploughing and growing crops, even going so far as to build houses, and lighting fires in these areas, get away with it.

My bush runs have been oftentimes distressing. So many more of these landscapes are now charred, bare and bleak, and regularly, I see plumes of smoke from yet another raging fire.

 

The small wildlife who miraculously manage to survive in these parts of our peri-urban landscape — the bushpig, reedbuck, duiker, scrub hare, jackal, mongoose, civet, genet, bushbaby, various rodents and more, are hiding, terrified, in tiny pockets of vegetation that escaped the blaze, now hugely more vulnerable to predation by either other wildlife or by humans, their whereabouts and movements painfully obvious.

With the nests of the marsh owls, plovers and other species who lay their eggs on the ground or on tussocks of vegetation in the wetlands burnt to a cinder, go this year’s off-spring and another lost breeding cycle. Into the sky goes the pollution caused by these unnecessary fires. People see bright green growth that comes soon after a bushfire and assume the fire to be beneficial — such a short-sighted view, for as with so many ecological issues, it’s the longer term that will show the damage these fires are really causing.

The same can be said for deforestation generally. Many of us can so clearly recall the thick and beautiful forest found on both sides of the Mutare road on one’s way out of the city limits driving towards the Eastern Highlands.

 

Today, this area is close to being a desert. Not a tree remains. This entire area, too, falls prey to massive fires every season, robbing the soil of yet more nutrients, and leading to yet further erosion, already rampant due to the fact all the trees have long since been cut down for firewood, none planted to replace them, and there’s practically nothing left to hold the soil.

THE CONSEQUENCES

Organic nutrients are destroyed in bush fires, and in wetlands, the ground becomes very hard and brittle instead of softly porous as it should be. Over time, the wetland gets dryer and dryer.

 

In both vlei and bushveld, fires lead to far more rain water simply running off instead of sinking into the soil as it should, eroding away with it, other critical soil nutrients and even creating flash flood conditions.

 

Bushfires also lead to detrimental climate change over time, increasing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere and inhibiting vegetation growth, which affects the overall carbon uptake by plants, and adding to global warming.

So many of these annual fires in our pleasant city greenbelts are caused by people who illegally grow crops in areas which should never be cultivated in the first place, for very good reason.  Cultivation clogs up a wetland, interrupting the complex water flow systems, till one day, even in our lifetimes — it’s a dryland.  Our city wetlands feed the rivers which ultimately we drink. Goodbye, water!  And we can’t live without it.

 

BY ROSIE MITCHELL