Toxic Futures
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Toxic Futures i ii Toxic Futures South Africa in the Crises of Energy, Environment and Capital David Hallowes iii Published in 2011 by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Private Bag X01 Scottsville, 3209 South Africa Email: [email protected] Website: www.ukznpress.co.za © 2011 groundWork All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. ISBN: 978-1-86914-211-7 Managing editor: Sally Hines Editor: Jane Argall Typesetter: Patricia Comrie Proofreader: Alison Lockhart Indexer: Christopher Merrett Cover design: publicide Cover photograph: South Africa’s biggest oil refinery operated by Shell and BP amongst the residential neighbourhoods in south Durban during a plant upset in October 2002 (by groundWork) groundWork is a non-profit environmental justice service and development organisation working primarily in South Africa but increasingly in Southern Africa. groundWork seeks to improve the quality of life of people through assisting civil society to have a greater impact on environmental governance. groundWork places particular emphasis on assisting vulnerable and previously disadvantaged people who are most affected by environmental injustices. groundWork is Friends of the Earth, South Africa. Printed and bound by Interpak Books, Pietermaritzburg iv Contents Foreword by Nnimmo Bassey vii Acknowledgements xi Abbreviations xii Introduction 1 Unequal South Africa 4 Carbon economy 8 The global scale of ecological debt 14 1 Elite crisis 19 Imperial crisis 20 Energy in crisis 30 Environmental crisis 37 Dust and ashes 41 2 The Vaal in South Africa 50 The concentration of power 51 Fronts of environmental injustice 55 Another Vaal 76 3 New South Africa 79 Negotiating the future 80 Environmental policy 91 Paint it green 104 v 4 The toxic cradle of production 108 The sacrifice to mining 108 Steeling the future 119 Power to aluminium 123 Toxics to cement 127 Leaving ruin 131 5 Peak poison 133 Failing future 134 6 The chains of petro production 165 Africa’s oil rush 165 Refining environmental injustice 173 Chemicals and plastic 189 7 Power trip 195 Centralising power 197 Darkest Cape 202 The logic of an elite future 220 8 Future power 222 Things fall apart 223 Remaking the coal economy 230 Terminal logic 248 9 Driving climate change 251 False dealings 252 South Africa’s offer 264 10 Change coming 280 For people’s power 282 Notes 304 Select bibliography 324 Index 337 vi Foreword From its first publication in 2002, the annual groundWork reports have become vital contributions to the unravelling and understanding of the swirl of predatory forces striving to pull the disposed and marginalised into the societal black hole. It is significant to note that the first issue came out in the year when the world marked a decade after the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The anniversary was held in Johannesburg and marked the receding of memories of a dream for a sustainable future. The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) could best have been described as a ‘corporate summit’. And so it was that as we stamped the path from Alexandra to Sandton, official participants to the summit were circling a mounted car, the sleek symbol of corporate power, perched conspicuously in the courtyard of their conference venue. It is fitting that Toxic Futures should be released on the eve of another pivotal event dragging the world to South Africa – the 17th Conference of Parties (COP 17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many suspect that with a thematic focus on ‘green economy’ and ‘poverty reduction’, Rio+20 or the twentieth anniversary of the Earth Summit forthcoming in Rio in 2012 will lean heavily on the planks erected by COP 17. The significance of the piggybacking will be that the world would have set the course of the coming decades on a fabric of false solutions, of negating sustainability, securing a tighter grip of the corporate world on the political and economic spheres of life and placing the struggling people of the world on a dicey battle for survival. The groundWork reports are life jackets thrown into shark-infested murky waters from which the disposed and the powerless yell for solidarity. As I read through the chapters of this book, I get drawn into the stories and feel as though I was standing on the fencelines with the fighters for environmental justice, be they in south Durban, in the Vaal or in the Karoo. And I have met some of them in vii person and continue to meet with them as the assaults on their rights persist and the resistance to the contrary waves require eternal vigilance. I have been to south Durban communities where kids pack inhalers to survive asthmatic attacks as though they were packing lunch boxes for school. Memories of the South African police arresting people and confiscating posters of my poems (including ‘We thought it was oil but it was blood’) during protests at the WSSD in 2002 remain as the most poignant reminder of the gravity of the challenges faced by dissenters in a period when peoples thought freedom bells were ringing over the tailings pits, the crammed townships and the acid drainages. This book may be based on the South African context, but you will see the direct application in many ways to the situation all over Africa. Peak oil has not weaned the world from crude oil. Not yet. The decrease in cheap oil has meant the clawing deeper into dirty energy sources. While sweet crude has never been sweet, heavy crude is never too heavy for an industry whose profits continue to soar because they continually externalise the costs to poor people and their environments, while excluding the same marginalised people from the decisions that promote how their territories are accessed and how their resources are extracted and used. Toxic economies suck the blood of the people – their labour, resources, their well-being as well as their socio-political spaces. This is why one can see this book as a handbook for direct struggles by environmental justice advocates, not just across Africa but across the world. We are united by the attacks on our environments and livelihoods. The struggles against environmental pollution, of land grabs, sea grabs and sky grabs are all one. There are no legislated boundaries to ecological problems. We are all on one planet. We applaud groundWork and UKZN Press on the achievements accomplished by this publication. David Hallowes’s keen insight into the interlinkages of issues shine through and we all benefit from these. The holistic approach adopted in the analyses of the environmental justice deficit in South Africa as presented here gives users a quick guide to figuring out what is happening elsewhere on the continent, from the Eastern to the Western, and from Northern to Southern regions. Toxic Futures helps us to connect the dots between the many crises confronting the world today. It also helps us to see why wars and violence are not inevitable occurrences but are necessarily engineered to keep peoples dislocated, disunited and open to further exploitation. As an imperial force on the continent, South Africa provides examples of what happens at both ends of the pipe of resource extraction and processes. The gold, viii coal, platinum and other mines show the damage and the levels of toxicity of the sector and that the concept of sustainable mining is nothing but an oxymoron. It also highlights the corruption (in every sense) that sustains the sector. The refining and manufacturing prowess of South Africa has translated into serious health breaches through pollution and at places this has saddled impacted communities with the duties of regulation enforcements. This happens because official regulators appear to have their hands ‘tied’ and are often unwilling to see or do what needs to be done. Toxic Futures urges us to understand that we are bound together by our humanity. Competition, dispossession and accumulation will continue to fatten the pockets of the polluters and emasculate the regulators while exposing our people to grave dangers and deeper impoverishment. The fight for environmental justice is not ‘the other fight’ – it is our fight. Nnimmo Bassey Executive Director, Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria Chair, Friends of the Earth ix x Acknowledgements This book is based on the groundWork reports, produced annually since 2002. The first four of those reports were co-authored by Mark Butler and the next three by Victor Munnik. This text uses their work as much as mine although they are not responsible for what I have done with it here. The groundWork reports had many helpers. Each carries detailed acknowledge- ments. They were informed and inspired by people from fenceline organisations and the wider environmental justice movement. Particular thanks are due to members of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance and the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance who showed us around their neighbourhoods and shared their thinking with us. It has been a pleasure to work with Bobby Peek, Gill Addison and the groundWork team over the years. They have enabled a sustained documentation of environmental injustice and people’s struggles for justice over the first decade of the twenty-first century. They presented us with challenging topics and supported the research process both intellectually and practically with the organisation of workshops, meetings and visits. Best of all, they put these texts to work in their campaigns and their engagement with allied organisations. Thanks to Sally Hines and the team at UKZN Press for seeing this book through to publication and giving me good advice along the way.