It’s a strange idea really, one that can only be explained if you can understand how my mind works – but so be it, the penguin has a solar panel, and this is why…

Last week I bought March Of The Penguins for my two daughters. I had never seen it before and thought it would be a nice nature documentary to entertain their eco-conscious minds, not realising that by the end of it I would be awe-struck by the incredible resilience and sheer survivability of this most exquisitely evolved creature. It’s aim is simple; to survive and create new life – by walking, sliding and shuffling 70 miles to a place where the ice is thick enough to bear the weight of the massed birds; surviving 2 months of almost motionless incubation whilst the female partner hunts for food with which to feed its new born chick; by circulating bodies in an astonishing ballet of temperature control, ensuring that no bird is exposed to the edge of the huddled mass long enough to freeze to death.

We mock the simplicity of animal lives, the “stupidity” of those creatures who have not reached the heights of our superior evolution – yet by our acts of superiority we destroy the very fragile environments which these marvels of instinctive behaviour have evolved to survive in. And the winter sun which so gently warms the eggs of the penguin to give them the energy to be born, we banish in our increasingly hot lands through our condensers, the effluent of burgeoning air conditioning in our homes, offices and cars, producing the very pollution that will cause the home of the penguins to tumble into the sea.

We squander our natural resources at our peril. That sun, beating down upon us, that is crying out to be harvested, stored and used, is just one more part of nature that has to be beaten. Yet if we had concentrated only a tiny proportion of the efforts that we have spent in exploring for oil, the technological breakthroughs in seismography, the engineering miracles that allow pipes to move through the oil bearing rocks to find the precious product of our animal past; then we could already have the ability to use solar energy as a normal part of our lives, rather than the desperate few watts that trickle into batteries from great sheets of silicon.

So let’s get on with it as a species and use the great brains we have. As a first effort, as a friend remarked to me today, let’s put solar panels on all of our cars, the very latest, most efficient types, constantly charging batteries, so that every car is effectively a hybrid. The auto-industry has the technology to move solar energy forwards decades, the lost decades spent tinkering with efficiency gains of a few percent.

If the penguins – those funny monochromatic, flightless birds – are able to use a tiny glance of the sun to bring life forth, then we should be able to use the same power to prevent life being taken. And use it NOW!

Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org
www.reduce3.com
And Proud Member Of The Sietch