Over the last three years, Cape Town has been suffering an extraordinary, once-in-300-years drought—helped along, most analysts surmise, by climate change. The shift in the city’s physical appearance is astonishing. The Cape is cordoned off from the rest of the country by a 5,000-foot-high wall of mountains. To the northeast, the landscape looks like the Africa of safari brochures: dry, hot and then jungly. But in the little bowl-shaped area couched between the mountain range and the southwestern tip of the African continent, the climate is exceptional. Its technical name is “Mediterranean.” To look out from the peaks toward Cape Town, a city of 4 million distinguished by genteel architecture and craggy slopes, has traditionally been like glimpsing Greece, if Greece were even dreamier: ivory houses, cobalt sea, olive hills, all threaded through by ribbons of gold and twinkles of topaz from wine farms. Fed by five times more rainfall than South Africa’s arid central region, the Cape area is one of the most diverse floral kingdoms on Earth, boasting giant blush-colored blooms. Cloud formations, from billowing white cumulonimbus to fogs that flow like rivers to mists that course like waterfalls off the top of Table Mountain, the crag that looms over the city, make heaven seem almost like a real place here, as playful and richly landscaped as the earth below.Some of that is gone now. Cape Town’s drought palette is a dull lime and beige. Lawns and gardens are dead. The city’s vast townships—spots legally reserved for people of color under apartheid—used to be differentiated from the wealthy neighborhoods that tumble down the Atlantic-facing side of Table Mountain not only by their location, tucked conveniently behind the mountain where they couldn’t easily be seen, but also by their own, less desirable microclimate, marshy and wind-scoured, prone to floods in wet weather and, in the dry and breezy summers, consumed by a cloud of grit. Dust, piled in little drifts in the gutters, was one of those signs that you were heading into a “bad” place. Dust is everywhere now.COVER: Cape Town’s largest and most important dam, Theewaterskloof, holds more than half of the area’s water when it’s at capacity. TOP: Cape Town as seen from the top of Lion’s Head, one of the two mountains that give the city’s downtown a bowl-like shape. BOTTOM: A “road” in the semi-desert area outside of town.
Source: Dry, the beloved country – The Huffington Post
Whilst the article is unnecessarily long, talking about the politics of South Africa, Apartheid, and being littered with stories and examples of humans coming together in the face of adversity, I cannot believe that more media coverage hasn’t been forthcoming on the state of drought in Cape Town.
There have been official devices attached to homes, to restrict water consumption, and there are even lines of people filling up water from public springs, to cope. People are collecting rainwater. They are getting ingenious with how they are conserving water. Everything from not flushing the water away unnecessarily (i.e. leaving turds and pee in the bowls, until it fills up), to recycling water for showers, from washing machines, and using dirty water to wash dishes, so as to make sure that nothing is wasted.
There seems like a genuine shortage of water in Cape Town, that shockingly isn’t being reported in the UK, or even mentioned in mainstream media, news, or outlets here in the UK. I don’t know if it’s visible in other parts of Europe, or other countries around the world.
Clearly there’s a lot to be said for the impacts of climate change.
Not least, that we are becoming more selective in the traumas, tragedies, and challenges that are being broadcast out from different cities, countries, and around the world.
The ingenuity, and resourcefulness of people during this drought, as well as the way in which it’s helping bring down barriers between wealth status, class, and colour/race, is all a positive sign of how humans can come together, when we’re forced to, in times of crisis, that gives us hope yet, of what may happen in the future, going forward.
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