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The stench of rotting blubber would hang for days over the Bluff, thanks to Norwegian immigrants whose harpooning skills helped stock Durban with cooking fat, margarine and soap, starting about a century ago.
The fumes became unbearable, and a local uproar soon compelled the Norwegians ‑ led by the crafty Durban consul‑general, Jacob Egeland ‑ to move the whale processing factory from within Africa's largest port to a less‑populated site a few kilometres south.
There, near the Bluff beachfront, the white working‑class residents of Marine Drive (perhaps including those in the apartment where I now live) also complained about the smell from flensing, whereby blubber, meat and bone were separated at what was the world's largest onshore whaling station.
Ever since, we have been the armpit of South Africa. Further south and west, the country's largest oil refinery was built in the 1950s, followed by the production and on‑site disposal of nearly every toxic substance known to science.
The whalers gracefully retreated into comfortable retirement in the mid‑1970s, their prey threatened by extinction. Today, just up the hill from the intersection of Bluff Road and Old Mission Road is the Whaling Museum.
There you'll sense the Norwegians' Vikingesque stance: brave, defiant, unforgiving to those they pillaged, and utterly unconcerned about the sustainability of the environment they had conquered.
Déja vu, earlier this month, when an invisible but persistent cloud suffused with a cat's‑pee ammonia aroma floated from the area's petro‑chemical complex ‑ the continent's largest ‑ south to Umlazi and north to Umbilo.
Once again the community's salt‑of‑the‑earth rabble‑rouser, Desmond D'Sa, of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance |(SDCEA), called a picket against an uncaring municipal bureaucracy. On Friday, November 12, the target was the city's environmental health officer, Siva Chetty, a former SDCEA cadre. But the smell returned, sourced to a business in Clairwood last Friday night, says D'Sa.
Protest
On November 26, D'Sa and his allies in Climate Justice Now! KZN will protest at the government's ICC hearings on electricity policy, and again on December 4 to raise awareness about the Cancun COP.
The South Durban community's persistent pollution crises are a visceral reminder that we must follow the example of ye olde Norwegian whalers, gracefully retreating from capitalism's reckless dependence upon oil, coal and gas. It is a task that society cannot avoid much longer, as a devastating climate change tipping point looms sometime in the next decade, scientists confirm.
Might such a detox be agreed to next December when Durban hosts the Conference of the Parties (COP) 17, the world climate summit? Recall how badly the global elites performed when tasked with making binding emissions cuts in Copenhagen a year ago. Not only were none made, but the 1997 Kyoto Protocol's minor 5 percent cuts (measured from 1990‑2012) were completely undermined.
Last December 18, SA and US presidents Jacob Zuma and Barack Obama joined Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders in wrecking the last vestiges of UN democracy and threatening their own societies (especially Zulu and Luo kinfolk who are on the climate frontline), on behalf of the (mainly white‑owned) fossil fuel industry and (mainly white) frequent fliers (like myself).
At the upcoming COP 16 climate summit, lasting until December 11 in Cancun, Mexico, these same men definitely need a strong wake‑up slap, not a quiet meeting place where they'll just back‑slap.
The last time Durban hosted such a sensitive global political event was nine years ago. On August 31, 2001, a march of 15 000 to the ICC led by Fatima Meer and Dennis Brutus against a pathetic UN racism conference came close to barging in on the lethargic delegates. The activists complained then of inadequate discussion about the need for Northern reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and about the failure to condemn Israeli racial oppression and occupation of Palestine, due to pressure on Kofi Annan from both Colin Powell and Thabo Mbeki.
Again today, there is rising disgust with filthy leaders who cannot even clean the world's fouled financial nests ‑ as confirmed by the G20 meeting in South Korea last week ‑ much less planet‑threatening emissions. Cancun will again demonstrate how US and EU rulers spend trillions of dollars to pacify the world's richest financial speculators, from Wall Street in 2008 to Athens, Dublin and Lisbon bondholders this month. But they'll balk at a few hundred billion required annually to save the planet.
The Norwegians in the campaigning group Attac are also intent on fighting what a workshop leader, Heidi Lundeberg, termed Norway's "Good Samaritan masking the face of our new oil imperialism". The Oslo government's Oil for Development fund provides millions to lubricate Washington's petrol and gas looting in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and also supports venal oil‑rich African dictators.
The same fund promotes carbon trading to mitigate gas flaring at oil wells. But this rewards both Northern financiers and Big Oil polluters with "Clean Development Mechanism" payola, buying "emissions reduction credits" for the Norwegian state in order to reform oil extraction.
At the world's worst flaring site, the Niger Delta, the activity has been declared illegal. Activists from Port Harcourt's Environmental Rights Action movement, led by Nimmo Bassey, demand that no carbon trading be allowed to legitimise illegal flaring.
Confounds
The same problem confounds another Norwegian Clean Development Mechanism strategy: dumping millions of alien‑invasive trees in monocultural plantations across East Africa. This wrecks local ecology and pushes out indigenous people, as the Oslo firm Green Resources is doing to 142 000 hectares of Tanzania highlands.
The Norwegian state is rewarded with 400 000 tons of carbon credit offsets, thus giving a green light for yet more Norwegian oil pumping.
South Durban, meanwhile, suffers a raft of petro‑problems: our massive greenhouse gas and SO2 emissions, regular fires and explosions, devastating oil pipe leakage, the world's highest recorded school asthma rates (Settlers Primary), a leukaemia pandemic, extreme capital‑intensity in petrochemical production and extreme unemployment in surrounding communities, a huge new pipeline to double the oil flow to Joburg, and an old airport earmarked for expansion of the petrochemical, auto or shipping industries. These contribute to SA's emissions record: CO2 per unit of per person GDP around 20 times worse than even the US.
This makes south Durban one of the world's most extreme sites of climate cause and effect: well‑paid managers run leaky‑bucket toxic factories by day and escape to western suburbs by night, and gasping residents either slowly die or wake in fear when Engen erupts with noxious fumes late at night.
Consistent with a global consensus that whales should be left in the ocean, the only solution to the climate crisis is one that genuinely decent Norwegian community residents, fisherfolk and environmentalists are promoting in their own petrol‑rich Lofoten region. The demand there is identical to that made by south Durban residents fed up with smells far more damaging than the decomposing blubber of yesteryear: "Leave the oil in the soil!"
# Patrick Bond co‑edited the 2009 UKZN Press book Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society.
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