Is pretty good enough?

Behold the compromise we may unwittingly be making on behalf of our descendants! How many South African hikers will walk here and notice that half or more of the plants around them are exotics on what used to be fynbos slopes? If we do not deal with this kind of invasive vegetation adequately in good time, our indigenous species may in some, or many parts of the country be swamped, replaced. The process is happening, slowly and fast, without sound, taking mountains, plains and valleys, here, there and maybe everywhere. Allowing invasive vegetation to escape or to continue in escape is a bit-by-bit thing. 

These mountain slopes will still be pretty in a hundred years if nothing is done. That is because all plants are pretty, weeds and exotics too, depending on which people are looking. In a hundred years we won't be looking, but will the people looking then know what we called pretty? Our children’s grandchildren may still love the same mountains, not even knowing that completely different plants used to grow there “in the good old days”. Or they’ll read in books about ericas, proteas and other weird things, while marvelling at the natural beauty of immigrant hakeas and pines that came from elsewhere.

Aren’t all people immigrants, depending on how far one checks back? What people can get used to in terms of immigrant neighbours, getting rid of xenophobia in the heart, can surely be done as far as plants are concerned? It’s the same thing? Not?

The diversity of the indigenous species of plants, the insects that pollinate them, and the mammals that roam the veld is a heritage still of great value to some in the twenty first century. But if nobody remembers it, or the arguments in favour are forgotten, the world has changed one more time into something fairly unimaginable to us. Life will go on, in a different way? Do we care? How much? What is the price of conservation today? And in a century from now?

How many generations before the physical South Africa, the nature where we hike, becomes unrecognisable? Project the line further and estimate the value system in times to come. And decide what causes are still worth working for in our time.