Hell or high water: Go green or no home

As Johannesburg stinks to high heaven, we would do well to heed the warnings: there is no alternative planet to inhabit [View this email in your browser]( February 18, 2021 [Mail & Guardian]( [Mail & Guardian]( [Twitter]( [Facebook]( [Instagram]( [YouTube]( Hi there, In Western mythology, as well as Abrahamic faiths, sulphur has long been associated with the devil and hell. Hell, as described in the Book of Revelation, is a “lake of burning sulphur”. The place as we know it in pop culture doesn’t appear in the Old Testament, but the book of Genesis does recount how God “rained down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah”. The description of a fetid hell ruled by an ultimate evil called Satan seems to have arisen at some point — probably in the first or second centuries before Christ — in the period between when the two sacred texts were written. As the texts reached a wider audience, it didn’t take long for the devil to start smelling like his fiefdom. Tradition placed hell as far as possible from all that was good and just: God and heaven. The Bible uses the word “Gehenna”, which refers to an actual rubbish dump on the outskirts of ancient Jerusalem, where waste would be burnt, and human sacrifice sometimes took place. This became a representation of the underworld because of its topography — as the lowest point in the area, it served as the spiritual counterpoint for the high ground of the temple mount. The same sort of reasoning imagined hell at the very center of the Earth, in a fiery and sulphurous pit. This isn’t a far-out fiction. Underground volcanic activity can release plumes of sulphurous gas, as rocks heat up in the absence of significant oxygen. Sulphur doesn’t always smell bad — given enough oxygen, it generally takes the form of an inoffensive sulphate. But when sulphur is given off from these hot underground sources, it comes in the rancid, rotten-eggs varieties of hydrogen sulphide or pure sulphur gas. In his book, Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur: Mythology and Geology of the Underworld, geologist Salomon Kroonenberg takes us on a literary expedition through time and religious tradition that turns a scientific spotlight on the many myths of the underworld. The Sasol plant in Secunda is believed to be the source of a stench of sulphur dioxide that has engulfed Gauteng and Mpumalanga since the weekend. The department of environment affairs, fisheries and forestry has confirmed this. Meanwhile, in a statement, Sasol claims the plant has been stable, with no incidents that could have resulted in increased sulphur emissions. Given its genesis as a way for the apartheid government to create fuel and escape sanctions, and the company’s recent history of trying to evade air quality laws, it is hard to trust the veracity of its claims. With the acrid scent hanging in the air, now is a good time to revisit our environment journalism. There’s no Planet B: there’s no special place to hide. We are quite literally all under one, pockmarked, polluted sky. Sometimes the only way for people to realise the cost of climate change is to explain it in terms of how much productivity diminishes with illness. Air pollution affects all of us, with dirty particles sucked into our lungs each time we breathe. These break us down from the inside and kill us, either rapidly or over time, adding to the burden of disease. Sure, none of us make it out of life alive, however, we needn’t gasp for breath while we are here. Each breath is killing you: The air you breathe is killing you. We know this because Sipho Kings investigated the state of our air, looking at data for air quality across the whole of South Africa. [Things are much worse]( than the government and companies let on. Midrand’s airpocalypse: Air pollution is [particularly hard-hitting in Midrand]( thanks to the huge volume of vehicle traffic and concentration of industries (the ones often responsible for that rotten egg gas that’s enveloped parts of Gauteng these last few days). On an air-pollution scale, anything between zero and 20 is safe to breathe. At 300, the situation is labelled “airpocalypse”. In Midrand, pollution levels regularly hit 1 000. Sipho Kings used data, a bicycle and a helicopter to see just how bad the air is. Live in JHB, lose three years of life: This sickens us to admit, but Capetonians may be right. If you live in Johannesburg your whole life, air pollution will mean you die three years earlier than you otherwise would. This is felt the most by those with the least, living in polluted areas, and is so much part of apartheid’s legacy and capitalism’s failure. Outdoor workers wilt in rising heat: Climate change is the biggest health threat of this century, yet knowledge about it is low in South Africa, says the department of health in its draft national heat health action guidelines released in October. Temperature rise because of climate change has negatively affected labour productivity in the country in recent decades and will keep damaging it. A future scenario with severe climate change will see a [reduction of per capita GDP of up to 20%]( by the end of the century compared to an idealised future without the effects of a changing climate. ‘Everyone in SA lives downstream from a sewage discharge point’: According to water specialist Anthony Turton, the country has a closed-loop system, whereby all drinking water comes from a river or dam, but [all sewage and industrial wastewater is returned to the same river]( but in a different place. A more comprehensive piece about Sasol’s Secunda plant by Chris Gilili will be online shortly. It may seem like we harp on about it endlessly, but good environment journalism really is a social necessity. How else would we learn about the dangers lurking amid our grey clouds? And yet to many media houses it’s just not sexy enough, doesn’t bring in the clicks and has little chance of going viral. Our hope is that you, our readers, will prove them wrong. Until tomorrow, Kiri Rupiah & Luke Feltham [Subscribe now]( Enjoy The Ampersand? Share it with your friends [Share]( [Share]( [Tweet]( [Tweet]( [Forward]( [Forward]( [Share]( [Share]( Copyright © 2021 Mail & Guardian Media LTD, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in to receive communications from the Mail & Guardian either at our website or by taking out a print subscription. Our mailing address is: Mail & Guardian Media LTD 25 Owl St BraamfonteinJohannesburg, Gauteng 2001 South Africa [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? 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