Nadine Gordimer - Get A Life

There was the possibility he might be ready to go with his team on another field research at present in its planning stage. When the wilderness received him he would believe the oncologists' guarded edict that he was all clear, belonged among humankind, animals, birds, reptiles, insects, trees and plants without taint or threat. The project was one for which Thapelo piled more and more documentation, including tape recordings of contesting opinions on feasibility from chemical engineers, social scientists, anyone and everyone concerned with environmental management, the professionals along with the Greens, Save The Earth, Earthlife, International Rivers Network – campaigners of all titles and acronyms.

A dam. Ten dams.

A conventional developmental concept this time. Old as when the earliest agriculturists rolled stones into a stream to block its flow for themselves. Not the pebble-bed experiment descended from deadly alchemy of atoms that can achieve space-fiction in reality. But as the nuclear plant is promised to light vast areas of powerless darkness, the great dams are promised to gather water to slake the thirst of human populations and the industries which employ and feed them.

The Okavango is an inland delta in Botswana, the country of desert and swamp landlocked in the middle of the breadth of South West, South and South East Africa. That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology. The consequences of what happens to the inland delta affect the region. How far?

The surveyors' sheets, both actual and speculative, represent the phenomena; as they are now.

Maze of waterways remembered as the glide of a narrow boat through passages between skyscraper reeds made by hippopotami, their local streets and lanes. Berenice was in the boat; not what she dubs with some due acknowledgement in her throwaway laughter, a macho bushboys' assignment. He thought he was fairly familiar with the ecosystem, at the time, had read up a bit to refresh this colloquially so she could share something of the wilderness he was fortunate to experience completely; while she had only her terrain of a city. But no – no reminiscent holiday snapshot album – a compilation of dossiers overlapping, having to be held down against the riffling of garden breeze by a stone on the bamboo-legged table: he realised he knew too abstractly, himself limited by professionalism itself, too little of the grandeur and delicacy, cosmic and infinitesimal complexity of an ecosystem complete as this. The Okavango could never have been planned on a drawing-board by the human brain. Its transformations, spontaneous, self-generated, could not have been conceived. And this is no evidence to be claimed by religious or other creational mysticism, either. The innovation of matter is greater than that of any collective of minds, faiths. As Thapelo would say, Yona ke yona – this is it! The capacity to visualise this complex, let alone create it, as a project of a multinational team of genius hydrologist engineers is as limited in scale as taking the hippo's part in maintaining the system as something that can be understood without the to-and-fro, in-and-out, problem-solving of the infinite whole. The Okavango delta in co-existence with a desert is a system of elements contained, maintained – by the phenomenon itself, unbelievably, inconceivably. The Okavango is a primal feature of creation, so vast it can be seen by astronauts from Outer Space. This is an excitement that must be confirmed – he has to leave the garden of isolation to go into the house and dial Thapelo.

Where to begin understanding what we've only got a computer-speak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins. Let's say, the known point at which we grasp its formation is where the rivers and streams converge and the patterns of their flow – meeting, opposing – create islands out of the sand they carry, landscapes within the waterscape. Trees grow; where do the seeds come from to germinate them, does the water bring detritus roots which find new foothold? If we identify the tree species, you'll learn from how far and from where water journeys have brought them? What journeys! They have brought sand and it's leached from along its routes, salt. Six hundred and sixty tons a year! That's the figure! In that calm delta disturbed only by the hippos and crocodiles, evaporation in an area bordering on a desert is extreme. The salt content becomes high; contamination problem, ay. Yebo! But no. Managed by matter itself. Trees suck up the water to the islands for growth. Salt comes with it. The sand filters the brackish stuff: clean water flows back, supports fish and the predators offish, the crocs, hippos, fish eagles.

– Cho! Ayeye! You're forgetting something. Chief. Didn't you read? Eventually the salt kills the trees, there's nothing to hold the island, it disintegrates, back into the water -

– Yes, but there's some formation of peat, and with the next rainy season the rivers come down again -

– From Angola from -

– The sand blocks channels in the reeds and papyrus, there're islands forming again, saplings sprouting again, it's been happening who knows how long? -

– Tuka! The salt? So what happened to the salt. -

– Exactly, we don't know how the salt is managed. It is . Probably seeps down through underground watercourses with increasing dilution and is widely dispersed in acceptable levels way through other areas of the region, part of the whole Southern Continental system. We drink that water! This's what we should work on, how with the Okavango the balance between positive and negative is achieved… -

– You think that'll change their minds about building the dams. Eish! -

– My brother – the dams are total negations. All this beautifully managed balance will be wrecked. Forever. There should be a category. Destructive Development, closed corporation of disaster. We're chronically short of water and it's not understood that this – what, phenomenon, marvel, much, much more than that – this intelligence of matter, receives, contains, processes, finally distributes the stuff God knows how far, linking up with other systems. If you and I decide now, how it begins, how it works, it still has no end, no dam walls, it's living. And some fucking consortium's going to drain, block and kill what's been given , no contracts. -

The blurt of laughter is the colleague's welcome at hearing a man at least sounding restored from the stricken substitute for himself found in the garden.

– Phambili! Top form! We're not going to let them get away with it. Woza! -

Forever.

The receiver replaced, the laughter silenced. Adrenalin that (like that other bodily signal) hadn't risen for so long, sinks normally. Still addressing – Thapelo or self – something slowly enters as a third voice, insistent to be heard. Follows, to the garden. And then back to the telephone; is the machine staring mute, or being gazed at, unseeing. But it's not picked up. There are areas of thought not meant to be shared, they question certainties held in common. Neither of you could go on pursuing what you do, being what you are, without them.

Forever.

How long is forever. How old is the delta that is part of the cosmos visible from Outer Space? Astronauts report it. Will ten dams be visible, the scale of ponds, like all man-made scratchings and gougings in comparison with the planet's own design.

Maybe we see the disaster and don't, can't live long enough (that is, through centuries) to see the survival solution Matter with infinite innovation has found, finds, will find, to renew its principle – life: in new forms, what we think is gone forever . In millennia, what does it count that the white rhino becomes extinct, the dinosaur's extinct, the mastodon, the mammoth, but we have the ingenuity of the evolved design of the giraffe, the elephant with its massive hulk standing vestigially web-footed with the memory of the fish. The first fish that dragged itself out of the amniotic element.