I WATCHED with interest those terrible fires in the Cape last month and the fact that some of the helicopters were scooping up sea water to dump on the fires set me thinking.
Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed) came to mind, an incident in the second century BC.
The Phoenician city state of Carthage (now Tunis) in North Africa had become a nuisance to mighty Rome, so the Romans applied their usual solution to such nuisances – they fought the Punic Wars.
The first two Punic Wars saw Carthage defeated, but then soon bounce back into the business of being a nuisance, so the slogan Carthago delenda est became very popular in Rome.
Comes the Third Punic War and this time the Romans take it one step further, defeating Carthage, selling the surviving population of the city, man, woman and child, into slavery and according to some sources salting the city’s extensive agricultural lands. Note that those parts of North Africa were very fertile back then.
So far so good, except that Rome desperately needed those lands for the wheat to make the bread to feed the noisy masses in Rome itself.
So what about the salting (salt applied to land tends to have a very negative impact on the vegetation) and what about the sea water used on the Cape fires?
I have seen some reports that claimed burning lands doused with sea water during the great Cape fires of 2000 had not recovered as well as those doused with fresh water. Hence the question, which I put to the people most likely to know, the provincial environmental authority, CapeNature, and they responded thus:
“Seawater can burn or damage, and even kill the plants into which it comes into contact. How badly can depend on the amount of salt and how far from the fire the water sprays, and how long the salt stays on the plants to the next rains.
“In wetter areas (such as here in Cape Town) the rainfall is high enough to wash out the salt before the autumn germination and the salt is usually gone by the time the seeds germinate. So there is minimal effect on the post-fire recovery of Fynbos or Renosterveld in areas where the salt was dropped.”
Fair enough, and it has also been pointed out that much of South Africa’s coastal vegetation has to a degree adapted to salt spray and sea air in general. So much for Carthage.
What makes Earth Hour special is that one is joining hundreds of millions of people around the world doing exactly the same thing in an effort to draw attention to pressing environmental issues, mainly global climate change.
We sit around a candle in the Hide (but then we do that most evenings anyway).
Cheers!
