Elective 1: African heritage and sustainable living in a context of extreme climate variability

Monday 9 – Thursday 19 July

Professor Robert O’Donoghue
Environmental Education and Sustainability Unit

Overview

This two-week programme will explore an emerging history of socio-ecological sustainability from the pre-colonial livelihood practices in the Eastern Cape to the climate change challenges of the present day.

Participants will start by planting indigenous trees with a youth programme of the Makana RCE to offset air travel carbon and daily fieldwork will be conducted on foot or by bicycle to minimize environmental impact.

Seminar and Fieldwork Programme (Week 1)

In the first week, each day will open with a participant-led seminar on comparative environmental history and change. The themes (forests, grasslands, water, agriculture and biodiversity conservation) will then be explored through encounters with local evidence of social-ecological change in the Eastern Cape, a region of extreme climate variation from pre-colonial times when regional migration from mountains to Zuurveldt mitigated the problem for the Xhosa cattle peoples.

The rest of the day will be in the outdoors exploring indigenous knowledge practices that have all-but disappeared with the advent of modernity but are being recovered and enhanced through a Stepping-up to Sustainability innovations (Water, energy, health, agriculture, biodiversity transport and waste) at the Environmental Learning Research Centre of Rhodes University.  This experience and a practical assignment on an area of interest will prepare participants to travel to and work together in a rural area for the second week of the programme.
 

Field-Trip (Week 2)

Week two will be centred on community learning where participants will be challenged to practically apply the knowledge and experience they acquired in week one. Participants will work in groups to explore a focus area and will learn with rural tutors who are innovating to live in ways that might best enhance livelihoods whilst restoring degraded ecological systems and processes. Each group will be challenged to prepare a seminar, reporting their work on learning to live in a social-ecological context of increasing climate variability, to conclude the programme.

The field-trip will be to:

• Cata rural village in the Amathole Mountains near the town of Keiskammahoek
• Coastal village of Hamburg on the Indian Ocean