People power Pay a day's wage

Ferncliffe Nature Reserve and its surrounds are under attack! Without natural predators, invasive alien plants out-compete local, slower-growing species, starving them of light and space. Others emit chemicals that make the soil unsuitable for competing local species: Bad news for biodiversity.

We experiment with methods that maximise alien control using shade. This minimises soil exposure, damage to natural species, and erosion.

And we weed around existing indigenous species to speed up the regeneration process.

All this takes time,  and dedicated workers! We want to offer decent, more interesting work to a growing network of local women and men — daily contract work at a respectable wage. But people hours mount up quickly: In 2013, intensively infested areas cost over R20,000 per hectare to clear. This figure has risen dramatically, and does not include follow-up. Help us create employment in a country that desperately needs more jobs — and heal the forest, slowly but surely. If you share your email address, we’ll send you a thank you and some news about the project in the future.

‘Anybody can dig a hole and plant a tree. But [to] make sure it survives. You have to nurture it, you have to water it, you have to keep at it until it becomes rooted so it can take care of itself. There are so many enemies of trees.’

Nobel Prize laureate Wangari Maathai