Rock | water | life: ecology and humanities for a decolonial South Africa

Author Lesley Green is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and founding Director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town. Her major over-arching project is to bring together disparate fields and to create an integrative and interdisciplinary network that interrogates and explores the variety of knowledges about our contemporary environment. Environmental justice, or eco-justice, lies at the heart of her work. Green is well published in her field, and her publications are concerned not only with southern Africa but, with David Green, she has also written about Amerindian, as well as Amazonian indigenous knowledge in Brazil. This book, written in the voice of the engaged-researcher, in the first person and with many autobiographical inclusions – “she cannot accept the comfort of academic distancing” (Foreword by Isabelle Stengers, p. xiii) – contains interesting ideas and stories that readers who have an interest in the “environment” in its broadest sense need to consider in our current era and in this particular moment in South Africa. The book is divided into three parts, each comprising two chapters – the arrangement is explained on pp. 17–19. In Part 1, “Pasts Present”, Chapter 1 (Rock) engages with geology, water supply, and the city of Cape Town and Chapter 2 (Water) with fracking in the karoo. Part II, “Present Futures” contains Chapter 3 (Life) that explores knowledge of Namaqua plant medicine and Chapter 4 (Rock), access to and use of land. Part III, “Futures Imperfect”, includes Chapter 5 (Life) baboon management and Chapter 6 (Water) marine resource and sewage disposal in the city of Cape Town and its surroundings. There is an Introduction, entitled “Different Questions, Different Answers” and a “Coda: Composing Ecopolitics”. All the chapters discuss highly contested issues that cry out for fresh perspectives if there is to be any resolution to them. Some of the chapters have enjoyed previous iterations (in the South African Journal of Science and elsewhere) and they can be read as standing alone, as they do not flow into one another as an integrated narrative. It is the introduction and the Coda that tie them together. In summarising the book, the Coda, in particular, makes interesting connections that demand attention and careful thought if South Africa and South Africans are to fare well in a time of global change. The ideas that permeate Rock | Water | Life may be helpful in charting any way forward but the author refrains from giving any blueprint or from offering comparison with other former colonised countries. The major thrust of the book is that there are different ways of knowing, each demanding respect for the insight into the issue that the others can provide. These diverse pathways to knowing – if acknowledged and understood – may create fresh concepts that advance understanding, although synthesis may well never be accomplished. Perhaps it should not be sought, the author asserts, but rather that the various knowledges confront one another with openness and humility. The general aim of the book is an