So, imagine for a minute you’re Bradley Wiggins, sitting astride the world’s most technologically advanced bike, set fair to blow the competition away. And yet, and yet, something’s holding you back. You look behind and horrified, witness attached to your rear end, a lady in full Victorian regalia, perched precariously on a penny-farthing.

OK, hands up, it’s a poor attempt at a crude analogy for China: the express-train of a country tipped to be the next world super power, held back by the baggage of yesteryear. Their continued support for illegal trades in rhino horn, tiger penis and shark fin is the core of the dichotomy they face as they transition (rapidly!) from one epoch to the next. The population is booming too. To not address the latter may add to the ultimate demise of the former.

Heavy

But fear not, as there’s a solution in the offing. At the Sustain RCA awards last week with Jamie, we witnessed one (winning) exhibit from Ai Hasegawa in the ‘Moving Minds’ category entitled, ‘I wanna deliver a shark’. I couldn’t possibly do her entry justice, so I’ll share the editorial:

“This project approaches the problem of human reproduction in an age of over-population and environmental crisis. With potential food shortages and a population of nearly nine billion people, would a woman desperate to conceive consider incubating and giving birth to an endangered species such as a shark, tuna or dolphin? This project introduces a new argument for giving birth to our food to satisfy our demands for nutrition and childbirth and discusses some of the technical details of how that might be possible.”

Wow. Left-field? Too far-fetched?

Perhaps not. I’d argue this is exactly the kind of mind-set needed to, at the very least, maintain the status quo of the planet. Yes, that’s easy for me to say as a bloke and obviously incapable of ‘motherhood’. For the foreseeable future, at any rate!

But before you fall off your chair with laughter, hang on a mo. I can back the argument up with an award-winning solution of my own to the worlds woes. Back at school, my art teacher, an old hippie, set us a challenge. Design something that would either:

- save the whales from the harpoon

- rid the planet of the nuclear threat

(CND & Greenham Common was big at the time, kids)

- stop waste going to landfill

Far too easy I say. Let’s see if we can’t solve all three problems at once:

Strap two nukes to a whale (I seem to recall sticky back plastic, glue and scissors, thanks Blue Peter), fill said whale with as much waste as it can (literally) stomach and fire the lot into space.

Hey Presto, three problems solved in one. Ridiculous and frivolous obviously. So imagine my (and the rest of the class’s) surprise when I actually won. Not for the practicality (!) but for the creative thinking employed.

Don’t follow the herd. Think differently.