Earthlife Africa is a South African environmental and anti-nuclear organisation founded in August 1988, in Johannesburg. Initially conceived of as a South African version of Greenpeace, the group began by playing a radical, anti-apartheid, activist role. ELA is arguably now more of a reformist lobby or pressure group. Considered by some to be a key voice in the emerging environmental justice movement, Earthlife Africa has been criticised for being too radical, and by others for "working with traditional conservation movements" in furthering the environmental struggle.
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The Earthlife Africa constitution (and name) was formally adopted at the first national conference at Dal Josophat, near Paarl (outside of Cape Town) during 1989. Earthlife Africa was chosen as a conscious attempt to avoid the split affecting two factions in GreenPeace who were vying for control of the organisation. ELA therefore took a different approach to the environmental struggle.
The ELA constitution was initially loosely based upon the Four Pillars of the Green Party and other movement documents. In attendance at this historical inauguration of South Africa's green movement were various members of related environmental organisations and ecology groups including:
According to Jacklyn Cock, "the concept of environmental justice was first introduced in South Africa at the Earthlife 1992 conference." Environmental Justice "was articulated as a black concept and a poor concept and it took root very well’ More accurately, it was the Environmental Justice Network Forum (EJNF) which was initiated at the 1992 conference hosted by Earthlife Africa on the theme "What does it mean to be green in South Africa.’ At this conference 325 civil society delegates resolved to redefine the environmental agenda in South Africa in broad terms and to move beyond the loose anarchist constitution which had bound members with 'values' as opposed to 'rights'. The South African National Conference on Environment and Development had already set the agenda of the green movement in 1991 and thus the 1992 ELA conference was merely a sequel and precursor of later development within the broader movement.
The exposure of pollution by Thor Chemicals, a corporation which imported toxic waste into South Africa, by Earthlife and EJNF working closely with the Legal Resources Centre, the Chemical Workers Industrial Union, affected workers and local communities was the crucial turning point in the re-framing and ‘browning’ of environmentalism in South Africa.
Earthlife launched the People’s Environmental Centre, the Greenhouse in 2002.
2007 ELA participates in a parliamentary portfolio committee hearing into the nuclear industry, delivering submissions and hearing from widows and workers affected by the Pelindaba accident
September 2010, Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan announces the ANC government decision to mothball the PBMR project. The cost to the taxpayer is in the region of between R7bn and R9.5Bn wasted on an unproven technology which could not produce a working reactor after more than 11 years of research.