Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Barbara Creecy, has invited comments on proposed amendments to the regulations that outline the procedure to be followed for the adoption of environmental management instruments.
The amendments were published in Government Gazette No. 48457 in Government Notice No. 3336 on 21 April 2023, in terms of the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA), 1998 (Act No. 107 of 1998).
The instrument regulations were published in terms of NEMA for implementation in 2019.
“The regulations published for comment include three amendments. The first amendment is on replacing the Department of Environmental Affairs’ name with a more generic reference, which will not require additional change over time.
“The second amendment is the deletion of the term ‘spatial tool’, as it already forms fragment of the definition of ‘environmental management instrument’.
“The third amendment is to enable the setting of registration requirements where exclusion of activities is enabled based on an adopted environmental management instrument, where deemed appropriate,” the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment said on Saturday.
Members of the public are invited to submit written comments or inputs by 22 May 2023 to the following addresses:
By post to: The Director-General: Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment
Attention: Ms A Van Reenen
Private Bag X447
PRETORIA
0001
By hand at: Reception, Environment House, 473 Steve Biko Rd, Arcadia, Pretoria
By email: avanreenen@dffe.gov.za
Any enquiries in connection with the notice can be directed to Ms Vn Reenen at avanreenen@dffe.gov.za or on 083 280 0730.
Comments or inputs received after the closing date may not be considered.
The Government Gazette can be accessed on: https://www.dffe.gov.za/sites/default/files/gazetted_notices/nema_spatialtoolsregulations_g48457gon3336.pdf. – SAnews.gov.za
Chicago Blackout
Cote d\’Ivoire: You have two cows. You rename your country Cote Leathoir.
Betty Cricket
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.