There are new killers on the loose

Mail & Guardian

30-05-2025

Purple haze: Jacaranda in bloom are beauties, but condemn the aliens.
There it was in stark black and white, the sad news that legendary Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado had died at the age of 81 in Paris. It is terrible news but the great man lived a full life travelling to the remotest corners of the world to document the lives of people, the environment and the relationship between the two.
Sometimes brutal but always beautiful, his images of human suffering led some to call him the 'aesthete of misery'. Probably his most well-known image is the one of hundreds of workers at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil swarming up crude wooden ladders weighed down by heavy containers.
But there are thousands of other equally unforgettable images — always black and white and often with the contrasts of light accentuated — from Salgado's trips to the wildest areas on Earth, from the Amazon to the Arctic.
In the documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-produced by German director Wim Wenders and Salgado's son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the acclaimed photographer, a man after my own heart, says: 'We humans are terrible animals.'
Something that I didn't know about Salgado is that after experiencing the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, in 1998 he put aside his cameras and founded the Instituto Terra. In a grand reforesting project he planted hundreds of thousands of trees in the Rio Doce valley in Brazil.
Amid the relentless barrage of stories about the forests being chopped down, or cleared to make room for planting, or just burnt in raging fires caused by climate change, these projects offer a glimmer of hope. And the sheer numbers of the trees planted are truly awe-inspiring.
India has an impressive number of inspiring characters who are leading the way in reforestation projects. Jaggi Vasudev, more commonly referred to as Sadhguru, founder of the Isha Foundation, says his ambition is to plant 2.4 billion trees. And with his gleaming white turban and flowing white beard the yogi, mystic, teacher and author has the gravitas to convince even the doubters that this ambitious plan is completely achievable.
Here in Johannesburg we are constantly told we live in 'the biggest man-made forest in the world' with more than 10 million trees growing in the city.
But Johannesburg is in danger of losing its place as the leading tree destination in the world, because our trees are not immune to the city's dangerously high crime rate. As yet the trees don't have a category in the crime stats, but if the rate of attrition continues to climb, the police commissioner will be reeling off some depressing figures of deaths, damage and murders.
The biggest culprit is the aptly named shot hole borer, also known as PSHB (the P stands for polyphagous, which means the beetle can feed on multiple types of trees).
Here is an expert definition of this criminal's modus operandi: 'The beetle infests trees by tunnelling deep into the trunk or branches and depositing a fungus that effectively poisons — and eventually kills — the tree. If the tree is a PSHB 'reproductive host' species, then the borer will reproduce in the tree at an alarming rate: a reproductive host tree can house up to 100 000 borer beetles. The offspring then fly out of the host tree and infest more trees.'
Evidence of this habitual criminal's killing spree can be seen all over Johannesburg. Bare, blackened tree skeletons with rotting branches.
Unfortunately the lethal little bug is not the only criminal attacking our trees. Humans won't let a two-millimetre sized insect from Vietnam outdo them when it comes to murdering trees.
I have seen jacaranda trees viciously attacked by chainsaw-wielding suburbanites because they are unhappy with the 'mess' from the leaves and the beautiful mauve blossoms when they fall.
I have seen a majestic plane tree in Bez Valley ruthlessly sawn down at ground level because a homeowner had opened a hair salon in his garage and didn't want the tree to impede the entrance.
I have seen massive oak trees subjected to hideously slow deaths by criminals who set fire to piles of the trees' own leaves at the base of the trunk.
These are trees that are on the pavement and supposedly belong to the city, but much like the smash-and-grabbers at traffic lights or armed hijackers who drive off with your car, not many of the tree killers are brought to justice.
The problem here might be that all of the trees mentioned are what is politely termed 'exotics' brought in from Europe and South America to line the streets of the first suburbs of the rapidly expanding city. Some, like the jacaranda, adapted so well to their new home and reproduced so abundantly that they have been declared 'alien invasive plants guzzling up all the town's water and are harmful to the environment and surrounding species'.
Sounds familiar doesn't it?
Even by today's standards the tree situation cannot be called a genocide but Sebastião Salgado would surely have found inspiration here for his searing photographs.