Nature is always on for World Wildlife Fund boss Morné du Plessis

For a year before he turned 60, Morné du Plessis chased orchids. He planned to find 60 types of these rare marvels.

There are 182 types of disa orchids indigenous to South Africa, each a unique evolutionary revelation blooming into an explosion of beauty a year after a bush fire triggers its germination. Sometimes Du Plessis walks for hours and days in search of them.

He reached his target of 60 and is now past the century mark. Not in years, just in disas. It is the kind of relationship with the natural world I would expect from the CEO of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in South Africa.

Before he took up his work at the WWF he was deep in academia running long-term studies into the nature of collaborative species such as  the hoopoe — birds that had fascinated him as a boy growing up on a farm in the Eastern Cape. “They are co-operative breeders, which sounds kinkier than it actually is. The flock works together to support the single breeding couple and to raise the chicks they produce.”

As we chat over lunch I think of these birds that could offer lessons to humanity.

We meet at Café du Cap, close to the WWF offices. It has an abundant harvest table, which ensures a quick and delicious lunch, with the added charm of the Newlands village environment in the valley below Table Mountain.

I confess to feeling low-grade environmental panic. I have been listening to recordings of melting glaciers and ice caps — a hollow, eerie soundtrack to the great acceleration, shorthand for the ecological s*** hitting the fan. Closer to home there are I keep reading about the baboon battles in the parts of Cape Town that bleed into the natural landscape, and the seals and otters in conflict with beachgoers. 

When I ask him to break down what is to be done he says we need to start with lunch.

“You have to ask how hot is my lunch. Agriculture is the biggest contributor to the degradation and deterioration of nature and ecological systems. That doesn’t mean I’m suggesting that the solution is to stop eating, because that’s not possible. But the thing is we can get a lot wiser about how we produce things, about our food choices and how we consume it.

“We need to get people to get to the point where they demand certain ethics or certain behaviour in production and to ask questions such as: ‘Was this a locally produced lettuce that is in my salad as opposed to one that’s been flown in?’ Or, ‘Is the fish that I have ordered from a sustainable fishery?’

“The moment you start asking those questions you have the power. Be very aware of the choices you make in terms of anything that you put on your skin in terms of clothing, or in your stomach.”

I joke that this is not the year for the WWF to mark Earth Hour by switching off the lights and he laughs.

“It was a symbolic gesture. We’re turning it on its head this year to say that the electricity might not be always on but nature is always on. Do you know that of what we ate today” —  mostly plant-based food —  “almost 100% of it requires pollinators to move around between plants in order to create the fruit and nuts? When you start fiddling with it, as they have in parts of Europe, you can now drive through fields and fields without getting any insects on the windscreen, which would normally be doing the pollination jobs.”

This story just raises my climate anxiety further but he feels more positive. This is the most aware the general population has been of these issues in the more than 15 years he has led the WWF, he says.

But the solution to the climate crisis has to be sustainable for everyone.

“Every solution has to start with the question of how do we improve lives for those who haven't got the ability to make choices. Ultimately we are going to have to make ourselves a lot more resilient. Resilient to harsher climates, more extreme events. Get people away from flood lines and then make sure that everything gets built to certain very basic specifications.

“While we’ve accelerated the shift towards clean, renewable energy, which is a very good thing, it needs to happen at the very local scale.”

Inequality is particularly evident in the ongoing water crisis, he says.

“We cannot have a society in which some parts are able to fill their swimming pools and others barely have anything to drink. We cannot have green lawns in some parts of the city and in other parts people can’t wash.

“This is very much an issue that needs to be dealt with that hasn’t been dealt with properly. And it’s not about taking pleasures and things away from people but realising that water is where inequality shows up in a harsher way than anything else.  

“Before 2035 we will have another Day Zero in Cape Town and we will have had one in Johannesburg. So we’ve got to think very differently, not inside of a crisis, but knowing it’s approaching.”