DELTA
ENVIRONMENTAL CENTRE
THE FIRST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
1975 - 2000
AND THE ROAD AHEAD
FOREWORD
by Dr Ian Macdonald, Chief Executive, WWF South Africa
(Back)
It is a great privilege to write the foreword to this volume, which puts on record, and pays tribute to, the first twenty-five years of the Delta Environmental Centre's activities.
As an organisation which primarily raises funds so as to make possible top priority conservation projects, WWF, the World Wide Fund For Nature, is almost totally reliant on hands-on conservation organisations such as the Delta Environmental Centre to carry out such projects. It is in this capacity that we have interacted closely with Delta over the years. It has always been a pleasure working in partnership with the excellent team that Delta has assembled to carry out its many environmental education programmes.
That Delta's premises are themselves a living example of the "re-use" of an existing facility, is in itself a real tribute to the originators of the initiative. One is reminded of the sage advice of that dean of conservation, Professor Paul Ehrlich, in his keynote address to the Conference on the Conservation of South Africa's Biodiversity held in Cape Town in 1988: "Our first priority in this uniquely biodiverse portion of the planet should be to ensure that all developments are located on already disturbed sites. "All pristine areas," he said, "should be considered sacrosanct!"
The founders of Delta were decades ahead of their time! If we are to try to guess what Professor Ehrlich would have said the second priority should have been for conservationists in this region, I think a good guess might well have been "the education of all the region's people as to the value and importance of the natural environments of the region, and their education as to how these environments can be sustainably managed and conserved". And this is just what Delta has been doing so successfully for the last 25 years.
All our experience over these years has hammered home to reality that for environmental education centres to work they have to be close to the major concentrations of the people one wishes to educate. Being located right in the middle of South Africa's densest urban population centre - the Greater Johannesburg Complex - has meant that Delta has been able to play an essential role in the environmental education scene in this country.
The simple truism that we will never conserve what we do not love, that we will not love what we don't understand, and that we won't understand what we have not been taught, is as true today as it was decades ago when this truism was first coined. Delta has enabled hundreds of thousands of South Africa's people to be exposed to the wonders and values of our superb natural heritage.
I wish all the people who work in Delta, and all those crucial individuals and organisations who support Delta in its important work, all the very best for the next 25 years, and the next, and the next - your work will never be finished and its importance can only grow with the passage of time. Strength to your arm!
Ian Macdonald
July 2000