African Wildlife Environment Issue 75 FINAL

GENERAL

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Your opinion is highly valued and welcome. Please send your feedback, letters, comments and suggestions to editor@wessa.co.za

Several letters responding to the Editorial in issue 74 of the magazine have been received. In order to do them justice and give them adequate space, they will be published more fully in Issue 76 (2020) ‘It is very sad that wind turbines cause the death of a variety of birds. But that by itself is no reason to advocate the opposition of wind turbines in order to prevent the death of birds. On that basis it could be argued that the use of motor vehicles should be opposed because they cause biodiversity road deaths. One could go even further and oppose the generation of electricity because of a multitude of unintended consequences to our biodiversity and to the environment!’ - Willem Hazewindus, Past chair WESSA NAR, and, Recipient of WESSA Lifetime Conservation Achiever Award ‘Your latest editorial about wind farms assessment I hope will save us from turning our fast vanishing ‘open space’ into fields of expensive whirling biocidal propellers. I visited Humansdorp some years ago where farmers are cashing in by accommodating these structures that would have challenged Don Quixote in hating his government even more. I met an Eskom technician servicing them there who DEAR MEMBERS...

WESSA will rely on the resilience, dedication and commitment of all its longstanding and newmembers for the success of membership in 2020, which will probably be one of the more significant years in building and strengthening membership. WESSA ExCo will continue to work closely with the regions and will provide them with ongoing support. On behalf of The Board and all WESSA staff, I would like to wish all our dedicated members and friends groups a wonderful and rewarding 2020 in our collective quest to be people caring for the earth. I hope you will take my words in the spirit in which they are meant, which is to provoke thought, and perhaps a conversation, about the energy/ conservation conflict in South Africa about which you wrote. I must say that there were a couple of things which I felt the need to respond to from your article. Firstly, I felt that your argument presenting wind energy as not ‘carbon-free’, to be a little misleading to readers. Of course, NOTHING is carbon-free. It is impossible to produce energy without ‘burning’ something, whether it is you or me walking up a flight of stairs, or shovelling coal into a furnace- both produce carbon dioxide amongst other things. The 'burning' of energy produces carbon dioxide in most instances in the natural world.’ Jack Fillery, Owner/Director, Tomjachu Bush Retreat declared them a waste of money and of limited energy production especially when the Cape winds occasionally die down.’ - Paul Dutton ‘I am not usually one who responds to articles or editorials, but I felt compelled to respond to your editorial piece in Issue 74 of African Wildlife & Environment magazine which I have just read.

I trust that you are all well rested and are already well on your way to embrace the start of a new decade in 2020. As I look back on 2019, I recall a year of daunting challenges, yet it was a year of remarkable movement towards greatness. The new Membership Model

and Standard Operating Procedures were finalised. I am glad to report that we are on course and currently in transition phase. The model has supported the WESSA Membership Regions with financial resources and reconfirmed membership governance with regional projects and activities.

Best wishes, Dr JT Burger CEO, WESSA

3 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 75 (2020)