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Whenever I think of tides, I think of that poem by Longfellow, “The tide rises, the tide falls, the twilight darkens, the curlew calls…”
But then I ponder - this isn’t a poem for our South African shores, it does not capture our heritage, our history, the kelp rolling in the ripples of the cold Atlantic, the strandloper’s footprints in the glistening sands, the oystercatcher flying low over the foaming waves. So it was with joy that I saw the official launch of the Veld and Sea Co-op, and their locally-placed Tides of Care programme.
The Veld and Sea Co-op is a Cape Peninsula-based initiative co-founded by Roushanna Gray, Dr Aaniyah Martin and Nassima Sadar-Gravier, bringing together Veld and Sea and The Beach Co-op. TimeOut readers might remember an interview we had with Veld and Sea founder Roushanna Gray and the foraged foods and delicacies that she encourages people to sample. The Beach Co-op, on the other hand, is a non-profit organisation on a mission to build ocean communities that care. They organise beach cleanups, empower coastal communities as guardians of our ocean, and bring science into addressing plastic pollution.
Together, they are the Veld and Sea Co-Op and their flagship ‘Tides of Care’ programme aims to connect people with nature, particularly communities who have been ecologically excluded because of apartheid or ‘fortress conservation’. The Co-op intends to establish living classrooms to connect communities with the beautiful biodiversity of the Cape’s coastal ecosystems and to teach with the tides themselves, the ways of nature, the means to restore nature, how nature feeds us, and how it keeps us.
The programme will be two years of creating space for local schools and communities to see, feel, hear, taste, and touch the wonders of the veld, the beach, and the sea. The Co-Op intends for all curricula, research, and resources generated during the initial project to be open-source and available to educators everywhere. They have also extended a welcome to students, visiting scientists, musicians, and other creatives to participate – it is a space built on ‘multiple ways of knowing.’
The Tides of Car programme will have two living classrooms.
One will be the Good Hope Gardens Nursery in Cape Point, a living site for fynbos ecology and rooted in decades of indigenous plant horticultural knowledge. Here, students will learn about foraging, wild food, and the medicinal values of indigenous plants.
The other is the Bordjiesdrif Education and Research Hub, in Cape Point, through a formal partnership with SANParks. Here, the wonders of our coastal ecosystems will underpin the learning. On the Atlantic shoreline of Cape Point, kelp forests, tidal pools and rocky shores provide a classroom full of ecological value and beauty. As Gray points out, “Together these two sites form a land-to-sea learning bridge at the heart of our work.”
Immersive learning experiences will include aspects of coastal restoration, strandloping, hydro-rugging (collaborative art made from marine plastic), climate change education, foraging, and ecological storytelling. According to Sadar-Gravier, it’s designed to “enable participants to experience environmental change through direct engagement with local ecosystems and collective action.”
Tides of Care aims to reconnect communities with the biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge and coastal heritage of the Cape Peninsula.
Gray’s words imply that this is just one pearl in the necklace - that this initiative is just the beginning of a broader vision – the first node – of a “Pan-African network of women-led, place-based learning and restoration”. This exciting initiative to foster creativity and value Indigenous knowledge will hopefully inspire generations to come. TimeOut wishes the Veld and Sea Co-op and all the learners all the best and looks forward to hearing about the creations and reflections of the Tides of Care programme in the years to come.
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