Nature of Life

Climate change is increasingly a tired old cliché, but told from an African perspective, the Foster brothers’ film is both refreshing and illuminating, focusing as it does on local and regional realities. They not only address the state-of-play on the African continent, but also look at uniquely African solutions to the problem and find answers in the very technologies that have taken us to the brink.

So the team at the Centre for Sustainable Energy at Stellenbosch University reveal their ‘hot air’ farms that have the capacity to power entire cities. There is the Darling Wind Farm Project, which feeds directly into the national grid. Sky kites on super tankers, viable, existing eco-villages, dye-sensitised solar cells that enable buildings to generate their own electricity, and South Africa’s own electric car, the Joule, are revealed.

The film’s intention is not simply to look for solutions, but rather to suggest a shift in behaviour and consciousness – toward a more sustainable, nature-based sense of life in balance.