Over the past few years, the South African state, in collaboration with private capital, has been facilitating the destruction of the natural environment in the name of "development" (Mahlatsi, 2018). While this has been particularly pronounced in areas such as the Wild Coast, where the state has sought to facilitate mining activities, the crisis is happening in many other parts of the country and is not limited to the countryside. Urban areas in the country's most industrialised provinces have also become sites of environmental destruction that is masked as "development". In the Vaal Triangle, chemical pollution resulting from years of mining activities by the petrochemical industry has reached crisis point. In 2021, the Human Rights Commission launched an inquiry i