Bringing ocean science to rural communities
CAPE TOWN - The UN Ocean Conference has come and gone but the urgent need to protect our oceans, remains.
READ: National Sea Rescue Institute | Raising funds for rescuers
A Cape Town-based design company Formula D is using interactive, travelling exhibits, to bring ocean science education directly to communities.
Their latest project blends hands-on learning with indigenous knowledge, showing how education and culture can come together to inspire environmental care.
Michael Wolf, Co-CEO at Formula D, discussed this with eNCA.
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eNCA
14 hours ago
- eNCA
Bringing ocean science to rural communities
CAPE TOWN - The UN Ocean Conference has come and gone but the urgent need to protect our oceans, remains. READ: National Sea Rescue Institute | Raising funds for rescuers A Cape Town-based design company Formula D is using interactive, travelling exhibits, to bring ocean science education directly to communities. Their latest project blends hands-on learning with indigenous knowledge, showing how education and culture can come together to inspire environmental care. Michael Wolf, Co-CEO at Formula D, discussed this with eNCA.
The Citizen
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Summit hears Pretoria company's small nuclear reactor offers independence
As South African cities confront load-shedding and economic stagnation, the search for energy independence has never been more urgent. For the Tshwane metro and other municipalities, a new option has emerged in the form of a locally developed small modular reactor, designed by Pretoria engineers, that promises to change how cities generate and control their electricity. This option was recently discussed and caught a lot of attention at the Energy Summit 2025 held at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The summit aimed to build a smarter energy system focused on powering a sustainable and inclusive future. It drew all stakeholders grappling with growing energy demands and pressure to transition towards clean, reliable energy sources, where Tshwane's energy future was the main theme. Developed by Pretoria-based company Stratek Global, the reactor offers a combination of safety, cost-efficiency, and energy security, making it an ideal fit for municipal deployment. Rekord spoke to a nuclear physicist and Stratek chairperson from Pretoria east, Dr Kelvin Kemm. He is confident that it can help municipalities. 'The reactor is designed specifically to be deployable at the municipal level. With this system, a municipality like Tshwane can own and operate its own nuclear power facility, independent of Eskom and free of geographic limitations.' He told Rekord that it is ideal for the metro, as unlike large-scale nuclear power plants, which require vast infrastructure and access to significant water sources, the reactor is self-contained and highly adaptable. He explained that gravity, natural cooling paths, and other physics functions have been used in design such that safety devices will fall into place naturally, under gravity, as cooling paths exist without active pumps running. When it comes to whether the metro would be able to use such a reactor if interested parties decide to commission the construction, he said, once the teams start building, it will take about five years to build the first reactor. 'This first one will take a year to 18 months for all the legal compliance, testing, and certification. From the second one onwards, construction will go faster.' He explained that the costs for such a reactor should be measured by how much the electricity will cost the customer. 'The electricity from the reactor will cost about the same as coal-fired electricity now. It is completely untrue that nuclear electricity will cost a huge amount,' stressed Kemm. He said there are huge economic benefits for the metro. During construction, hundreds of people will be employed in good-quality jobs, like any industrial construction. Construction materials will also be purchased from local suppliers. Tasks like forming metal parts, cutting, machining and high-integrity welding, and so on, all need to be performed and sourced. 'When the reactor is running, it will employ a couple of hundred people on a full-time basis. These range from engineers to skilled technicians to react to operators to draft craftsmen, such as plumbers and electricians. Many private companies will be involved, supplying goods and services on a regular basis.' According to Kemm, a representative from their Pretoria branch has twice travelled to a country in the Middle East to explain their proposal and architectural designs were carried out for that country, by Pretoria east architects JKDA. To him, it is a positive factor that South Africa has one of the oldest and most experienced nuclear regulators in the world. He said Stratek Global has an impressive building in Centurion, and there is a staff of some 150 people. 'They check and certify all issues concerning the design and construction of any nuclear system, to ensure the safety and protection of people and the environment.' He added that the principle of private or municipal ownership of electricity has already been established by the government for wind and solar systems. 'There is no reason why nuclear will be different. So, the metro, or groups of companies in Rosslyn, could install their own nuclear power. One reactor complex will fit easily on a piece of land the size of a football field. Such ownership is perfectly feasible. In fact, it is possible to have your own private grid,' he concluded. Do you have more information about the story? Please send us an email to bennittb@ or phone us on 083 625 4114. For free breaking and community news, visit Rekord's websites: Rekord East For more news and interesting articles, like Rekord on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading! Stay in the know. Download the Caxton Local News Network App Stay in the know. Download the Caxton Local News Network App here
Daily Maverick
4 days ago
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From anti-apartheid to Antarctic rights — the radical legal vision of Cormac Cullinan
The South African lawyer believes the melting continent should be recognised as a legal person. The growing momentum behind the idea — and a major polar award — suggests the world may be ready to listen. When Cormac Cullinan strolled into the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London earlier this month, he thought he was there to answer a few questions for a panel of judges. Cullinan, a Cape Town-based lawyer and a figurehead of the international Antarctic Rights initiative, had been shortlisted for the 2025 Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions. He insists he had no reason to expect he would win the £10,000 prize and a hand-struck silver medal. Fellow nominees included polar luminaries — scientists, conservationists and contemporary explorers. Sir Ernest Shackleton's granddaughter, Alexandra, was a judge. 'I was surprised to be shortlisted,' says Cullinan, the environmental lawyer who helped suspend Shell's seismic surveys off South Africa's Wild Coast. Cullinan had let the organisers know he would be passing through London in early June, in case they wanted to meet him. The RGS's official line was that the final decision was yet to be made. When they asked him to meet the executive, he assumed it was just part of the shortlisting process. 'It was a really amazing building,' he says. 'On one corner is a statue of Shackleton, on the other David Livingstone. These great explorers had been members.' He sat at the end of a table, surrounded by the RGS top brass and a publicity team. 'I thought they were filming it because not all the judges were there.' What happened next blindsided the South African. 'I didn't think my beard was rugged enough' 'They said, 'Before you go, there's just one more thing.' They put a laptop in front of me,' Cullinan recalls. 'It was the Shackleton award video. When it came to the end, it said, 'And the 2025 winner is… ' And this picture of me came up.' The organisers had choreographed the moment to the last detail, complete with a photo shoot and Shackleton expedition-style jersey on hand — modelled after the one worn by the Irish explorer in a famous photograph. 'At least it made me look more … Shackletonian,' Cullinan smiles. 'Even if I didn't think my beard was rugged enough.' Cullinan, the legal pioneer behind the concept of earth jurisprudence, says the award is a collective recognition for the Antarctic Rights initiative. They had just met in Devon, followed by academic discussions in Oxford. 'It was extraordinary synchronicity,' Cullinan says. Cullinan hopes the recognition from the Shackleton Medal will open doors. 'This thing will give us huge leverage,' he says. An inclusive voice for the imperilled region At the core of the initiative is the radical idea that the frozen – but melting — Antarctic continent and surrounding ocean should be recognised as a legal person with its own voice in global governance. The initiative's draft declaration supports human involvement in the region, such as science and activities like controlled tourism and fishing. Even so, Cullinan argues that Antarctica's representative voice 'would be a pure kind of voice for nature and Antarctica'. This probably means refining the Antarctic Treaty System in its present form, he argues, which he describes as secretive and often gridlocked by geopolitics. 'I had to unlearn what my culture had taught me' Cullinan's path to the Shackleton Medal began on Durban's segregated beaches during the final decade of apartheid. 'I cut my teeth as an anti-apartheid activist,' Cullinan says. A 1980 student exchange to New Zealand exposed him to an unflinching external view of his home country. As a founding chair of the Durban Democratic Association, an affiliate of the non-racial United Democratic Front (UDF), Cullinan remembers organising 'street marches to go on to segregated beaches and many different things … 'I had been born into the oppressor class. When the scales fell from my eyes, I had to unlearn a lot of what I had absorbed unconsciously from apartheid society. I ended up leaving the country to avoid conscription, because I wasn't going to fight for that army.' Thomas Berry, the American eco-theologian, gave Cullinan the concept to move from political activism into jurisprudence. That idea of unlearning dominance would become the philosophical heart of what Cullinan later called earth jurisprudence: a radical reimagining of the law and seeing it as intrinsic to the ecological order. 'Berry taught me that the philosophy of law only deals with humans and corporations. But legal philosophy needs to deal with all our relationships — including with beings other than humans,' Cullinan says. A global movement for Antarctica — 'modelled' on the UDF This led to his 2002 book Wild Law, which set out the founding principles of earth jurisprudence. From this grew a movement. In 2010, Cullinan was asked by Bolivian campaigners to lead the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Bolivia's legislative assembly passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth that year — around the same time the lawyer helped co-found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. 'To my mind it was modelled quite closely on the UDF in South Africa,' Cullinan says. 'An alliance of organisations of many kinds, united around a few core principles.' That idea — with nature as a legal subject and ecocide as the crime — neared a possible new frontier when Cullinan was approached by German MEP Carola Rackete in 2021. Rackete asked him: Could rights of nature be applied to Antarctica itself? 'I thought, 'Well, if Antarctica is going to have rights, it has to be a person in the eyes of the law,'' he remarks. 'I realised you're talking for the first time about an ecological entity being a person under international law.' 'Open' for input Cullinan and a working group of academics, lawyers and legal campaigners have set out to draft the Antarctica Rights Declaration, now open for feedback. It proposes rights for the region which would, in theory, enable the Antarctic to hold states or corporations accountable for actions that violate those rights. To represent Antarctica's interests in an international court, Cullinan suggests a kind of parliament may emerge — a representative body that appoints delegates to climate summits and biodiversity talks. Representation, he boldly adds, may even include participation in Antarctic Treaty consultative meetings, the annual governance gathering which this year opens in Milan on June 23. 'What's good for Antarctica,' presses the Shackleton Medal recipient, 'is good for humanity.' DM
