Dear Editor
The Wild Coast Mallet Award for Fiction

George Monbiot , the widely respected British environmental journalist and social commentator, recently announced that he was putting up a prize for the writer of ‘best climate change fiction’ of the year. This would be awarded to that person who “manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement, lecture, film or interview about climate change.”
Following on Monbiot’s footsteps, we suggest that SANRAL’s Mr. Fanie Van Aardt deserves a ‘Wild Coast Mallet Award for Fiction’ for his statements about the impacts of the N2 Wild Coast Toll road which recently appeared in The Herald article ‘Wild Coast does not need Toll road’.
Mr. van Aardt’s dismisses SWC’s concerns that negative environmental and social impacts of the road will lead to increased poverty, unless the road is accompanied by a regional development plan, as being unfounded and ‘speculative’. As these are the same concerns that are raised in detail in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) specialist reports about social development and environmental impacts, does this mean Mr. Van Aardt also considers the EIA findings to be purely ‘speculative’?
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Posted on February 16th, 2009
Filed under: Letters