The Phoenix Sun

A solar hot water heater for every house.

While accompanying a group of American secondary school teachers through South Africa a couple of months ago (on the Toyota International Teacher Program), I had a great surprise. We were on a bus north of Durban, traveling to a reforestation project when I realized that nearly every house we passed had a solar hot water heater on the roof. This went on for at least a couple of miles. As you can see from the picture, the houses didn’t fit the stereotype of yuppie green homes. This was a none-too-wealthy rural area with small cement block houses.

CO2 emissions of selected countries.

South Africa is the second largest emitter of CO2 per capita on the African continent (after Libya) and much of that is associated with electrical generation. In South Africa, as in the U.S., coal-fired power plants produce most of the electricity, so using solar hot water heaters rather than electric ones makes a lot of sense, both from a carbon standpoint and from an economic one.

I had hoped to get off the bus to take more pictures and talk with residents, but our schedule was already overbooked and the chance to stop at the “solar neighborhood” never happened. Still, it was exciting to see — especially since the solar homes just happened to be on the route to another climate change initiative, where “tree-preneurs” raise indigenous trees for a large-scale reforestation project. But that’s another story.

It really was a perfect day when I took this GigaPan image at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, South Africa. Composed of 160 individual photos, the panorama covers 260 degrees in width. One of the joys of viewing a GigaPan is that it’s a participatory process. Hiding within those 260 degrees are probably upwards of a hundred species of plants — all indigenous to South Africa — and birds, insects and a few humans. Feel free, of course, to explore here by zooming in on anything that intrigues you. But, if you want to share your finds, you can create one of those snapshots you see at the bottom of the picture. To do that, click here to go to the image’s true home, on the GigaPan Website.

Simply, one of the most beautiful and important botanical gardens in the world. Maintained by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). Nearly half of all plant species found in the southern half of Africa exist on one tiny sliver of land surrounding Cape Town. The Cape Floral Kingdom is home to an astonishing 6,200 species of plants found nowhere else on earth, many of them are found in Kirstenbosch. (You can see the photo in a larger format and read about the technical details, here.