by Peter Knight | Mar 29, 2024 | Blog
Nothing much eats a porcupine. But what a porcupine eats could signal the end of the Laager Aloe, an ancient plant that lives for up to a thousand years in South Africa’s increasingly arid Karoo. This semi-desert region stretches for about 155,000 square miles...
by Peter Knight | Dec 16, 2023 | Blog
Gideon Kondjeni makes high-quality charcoal from thorny Acacia trees invading his farm in central Namibia. He sends it six thousand miles north to Europe and Scandinavia where Kurdish and Indian restaurants depend on his artisanal fuel to keep their traditional ovens...
by Peter Knight | Aug 5, 2023 | Blog
What do you do with a redundant steel mill and its blast furnaces, cranes and contamination? Level the land, cap the toxins and build new, erasing the memories of an industrial heritage that defined generations? Or repurpose symbols of a manufacturing past as...
by Peter Knight | Jul 17, 2023 | Blog
You’ve checked off the big five in the Kruger, witnessed the sudden gush of Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone and marvelled at the migrating antelope in the Serengeti. Why bother with the South Downs National Park in England’s congested south? No...
by Peter Knight | Jun 25, 2023 | Blog
Wildfires favour non-indigenous species – but not always. In the Cape Fold Mountains of South Africa there’s a patient native of the Fynbos. Its bulbs will wait in darkness, sometimes for many years, until bushfire jump-starts germination. Or more precisely it...
by Peter Knight | Jun 13, 2023 | Blog
My late mother, a schoolteacher in rural South Africa, always carried a large knife in the glove box. We called it the Alien Killer. Driving home from school with a bunch of sweaty kids and a supportive Staffordshire Terrier she would often stop suddenly and reach...
