Bulbine narcissifolia

Bulbine narcissifolia also grows in the Drakensberg. The plant tends to take over where the going is hard for many other plants. This bulbine thrives on little, stores resources in fleshy roots. High mountains aren’t really for all people either!

If we are heading for a downsizing phase in nature due to climate change, the people who come through the challenge will have a reduced biodiversity for a long time, read countless generations. What that resultant mix of plants and animals will include we cannot know now but may guess from the comparative resilience of the plants and animals around us.

The culling of plants, plant species, animals, animal species and people has been a repeated occurrence over the 3,5 billion years of life on earth. Much of this we know by reconstructive exploration of the earth’s past as our recorded history is thin on long term effects. Unimaginable hardship that happened and may happen again during extinctions goes hand in glove with such natural events. These include extensive and intense hot, cold and dry periods, meteorite hits and earth crust instability. It’s like war: not about who’s right, but about who’s left.

Time puts distance between extinctions and relegates hardship to history. The wiping out a big percentage of life, including the earth’s human population (such as also happened during bubonic plague when only people were affected), is traumatic but largely forgotten by later generations. We feel nothing and equally little for ancestors a hundred, a thousand and a million generations ago. They are strangers, not even all of our species!

So, time heals! Later generations look into their children’s eyes and live happily, no matter which foods are no longer available, or which animals are no more seen. To live well, people focus on life, yet inevitably learn to understand where death fits in. If anything survives, including some people, there will be newly evolved plants and animals of every (today) inconceivable kind, as well as new plans for their use (Frankopan, 2023).