By Chris Howe

One of my favourite cartoons is pinned to the wall in our WWF offices. It shows a couple of scientific-looking people crouching down and peering at the ground and saying “There must be a source of energy down there somewhere.” Meanwhile, the sun beats down on them from a cloudless sky.

Ninety percent of the species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. So extinction is the norm. Some of these species lived for tens of millions of years or more, making them a success by any measure. In contrast, modern humans have existed for a few hundreds of thousands of years at most.

Species have gone extinct for a wide variety of reasons. Changes in the Earth’s climate, the evolution of new predators, and even asteroid impacts have all been attributed as the cause for extinctions. It is also almost certainly true that species in the past modified their environments sufficiently to a point where those environments could no longer support them.

What seems quite clear is that modern humans have an attribute that is comparable to no other species that has ever lived: our ability to think, analyse and make decisions based on information about our environment. It’s why the scientific name for our species is Homo sapiens sapiens: literally “thinking man.” That is what makes our current behaviour so perplexing on the one hand, and so expected on the other.

We should be able to think our way out of the threat of extinction like no other species ever has; but we seem to be following the path towards extinction just like most of the species that have ever lived.

Our addiction to what we might loosely call non-renewable resources displays clearly our inability to use our intelligence effectively. The sun is an endless source of unlimited energy. But our brightest and most creative brains choose to spend their time and effort working out quicker and faster ways to extract coal and oil from under the ground, and burn it very inefficiently.

Most internal combustion engines use a mere 10-20 percent of the energy available in the fuel they burn, and the fuel itself is a finite resource.

Another example is the way we construct our buildings. Very few buildings are constructed in a way which allows their easy deconstruction. We’ve all seen the TV images of hotels in Las Vegas and tower blocks in East London being blown up spectacularly once they’ve reached the end of their useful lives.

But imagine a scenario where they were simply deconstructed, and the components re-used in a new, different building somewhere else. Imagine a very large set of components for buildings that could be used and re-used, traded or given away, that reduced significantly our demand for new materials but allowed infinite creativity by architects and designers. And then imagine a world where we no longer have to constantly mine and dredge and dig for ever more supplies of raw materials.

The point is that as humans and thinkers we have the ability to change the way we are living, unlike the majority of species that have ever lived, so that extinction – the norm – is avoided.

The question is: why aren’t we? Why aren’t all the engineers and scientists employed by BP, Total, Shell and Exxon to prospect for and extract minerals, at a huge cost economically and environmentally, instead employed to develop highly efficient systems and products for renewable energy generation, distribution and use? Why aren’t the world’s leading architects and engineers working on developing infinitely re-usable building components?

Why does the New Zealand Government’s draft energy strategy, released yesterday (Thursday 22 July) for consultation, go into significant depth on extracting fossil fuels to power New Zealand’s economy yet is more or less mute on plans to encourage renewable energy?

The amount of energy available from the sun is staggering. It delivers up to 1000 watts of energy per square metre. That’s enough to power 10 100 watt lightbulbs, 24 hours a day, indefinitely, for every square metre of the earth’s surface. What if BP, today, re-allocated its 80,000 employees to efficiently capture and distribute just a fraction of that energy.

What has happened is that, as individuals and as a species, we have made some choices about how we live, what we have applied our intelligence to, and how we use our resources. Those decisions seem to be placing us as just another normal species, like the majority of species that have lived on earth, heading towards extinction.

I believe WWF’s role is to do our best to make sure that we are not just another normal species. We need substantial and fundamental shifts in the way we live. If we look around at the astonishing array of intelligence, creativity and imagination that has gone into creating the world we see today, I simply refuse to believe that we can’t harness that same intelligence, creativity and imagination to create a different world where we end up, by choice, in the 10 percent of species that do not become extinct.