Small and Achievable

I spend a fair amount of time wondering why human behaviours that have quite profound negative effects on nature persist. Considering the concept of social inertia – which posits that through our engagement with social space, we often develop behaviours and habits that serve to maintain the status quo – has helped. Of course, it’s much easier to ponder themes like the effects flat in Cape Town where we’d lived for the first few years of our marriage, enjoying all that it had to offer. Before we knew it, we were expecting a baby and so the frantic search for a real house with a garden and a kitchen slightly bigger than a bathroom drain had begun. We found this place in the form of a spacious home in Cape Town’s northern suburbs – one with a lush buffalo-grass lawn and Australian brush cherry shrubs trimmed into lollipops. My wife started nesting immediately. She was six months pregnant and with the kind of Herculean effort that only seems to reside in people with deadlines, deftly organised our new home so that the family heirloom ball-and-claw radiogram had its own new place right beside the newly varnished cot I had once slept in. Outside, I did nothing. In retrospect, I was in the grip of drought-induced ecological grief and could not countenance “wasting” a single drop of water keeping a lawn going when farmers were pondering which block of fruit trees they had to sacrifice, and emergency boreholes were being sunk in ecologically sensitive places.