Casting words into the future to be processed in a four-week-long editorial programme is a strange business in a world that seems to spin ever faster. It is as if Instagram were mired in treacle, electrons crawling to deliver a photo of tonight’s great dessert some weeks hence, by which time dinner guests, occasion and location will have been long forgotten.

One might, in response, have recourse to matters of a somewhat weightier import and longer lifespan but, though I feel passionate about, say, misplaced gerunds and the increasing use of ‘multiple’ in place of ‘many’ in the daily papers, I suspect that linguistic pedantry will not capture the imaginations of readers of this august journal. Nor will it be much of a call to arms in this, an age of so many incipient catastrophes. It sometimes seems our hapless globe is the football of the gods, passed from hand to hand along a footy backline with pandemics, earthquakes, volcanoes and storm systems lined up and an almighty punt to the heavens a mere disaster away.

If this seems somewhat melodramatic, it reflects a lively night, one that even I will have forgotten by the time the type is set on these pages, yet, one in which we woke to find ourselves in the eye of a cataclysmic storm, thunder and lightning crashing around our little plywood box perched on the Northland hillside. I thought I might distract myself from imagining the various fates my projects nearby might be facing by counting the time between flash and clap and thus calculating the distance to the epicentre. I was doing fine at first, though showing my age with imperial measurements; three miles, two miles, then an almighty flash and blast seemed located in the very room I was tucked up in. It was as if Vonnegut’s Handicapper General had me picked as a smart-arse and sent out a spectacular concatenation that banished mental arithmetic and left me shaking in awe of the heavens.

Perhaps, by analogy, we might say the world sits shaking in awe of the spectacular consequences of our wanton disregard for the natural order of the planet. It is as if we are catatonic, unable to act, as yet more evidence of our depredations is laid before us in the morning missives from the cloud, the net and even those last remnants of the hard-copy fourth estate. There is an uncomfortable, growing awareness that we occupants of Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth might not be very different from the COVID-19 virus, that the slightest exchange between virulent human life forms will inevitably prove to be yet another step in the incremental destruction of the planet. In this analogy, we architects are pretty much the shock troops, our elaborate plans and specifications organising the relocation of materials from one place to another and, in the process, running up road miles, air miles and sea miles, and filling the air with industry’s effluvia.

This is not news to any of us; it is the original sin with which we live, that every act of creativity has a planetary price to pay. I have to say this is a sobering realisation given the wild optimism with which I started architecture. It is also a very different sort of endgame from that which I had imagined during my dawning political consciousness in the early 1960s. In those simpler days, the radio news told hour-by-hour of the progress of Russian missile-carrying freighters towards US President Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba and, later, of the Yom Kippur War that brought the proxy states of the US and USSR into conflict yet again and left us hapless citizens teetering on the brink of nuclear oblivion.

The memory of those events dwarfs that of my puny thunderstorm and the death tolls are an awful indictment of the tribalisation that seems endemic to our species, yet we are, today, faced with a much more insidious demise than any amount of nuclear weaponry might deliver. The current possible manifestations of Armageddon are legion and seem to spawn by the month, as plague, pestilence and climate change slug it out for primacy in the disaster stakes.

I appreciate that, having been part of the baby-boomer generation who laid waste to so much in the decades of hedonistic orgy we enjoyed, there is an uncomfortable hypocrisy in me blowing a trumpet to warn of the end of the world. In my defence and of those of us who faced clear and singular foe, be it US imperialism, apartheid or French nuclear testing, this is a confusingly complex time. Each new threat seems to build upon the one before, only to be occluded by a yet-more-immediate and catastrophic one. As we just clear one hurdle, the question remains, after hand-washing and mask-wearing, what are we to do for the polar bear, the bee and, even, so I am told, the lowly earthworm, given the enormity of the issues we face?

Despite the ignominy of our near-total irrelevance in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes, a disaster to which we might have expected to have been able to make a decent contribution, I remain convinced of our value at the coalface of survival. Our ability to assimilate, process and make sense of complex and contradictory information is a useful skill in resolving the conundrums of plague, climate change and shrinking biodiversity, and those things which, in Donald Rumsfeld’s words, “… we don’t know we don’t know about”. At issue, though, is whether we architects can effect any meaningful change in our bailiwick and, if so, whether this can be done by our acting within the confines of practice or whether some more coordinated effort is required.

I am certain that, setting aside what I hope are no more than a few climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy loonies within our flock, we are generally committed to action on the issues, at least in the interests of self-survival, if not for an ethical commitment to the well-being of one’s fellow passengers on spaceship earth. I appreciate that the idea of ethics has been somewhat disembowelled by the registration board’s derisory bullet-point list that reads more like business course 101 than an Aristotelian discourse on virtue, but even the RAB’s flaccid list assumes some vestige of responsibility to our fellow citizens.

The big issue is whether we slug away on our own, figuring out how to save the planet, or whether we might join together to increase leverage and effectiveness. Most of us are, of course, signed up to a well-organised, funded and resourced organisation that does good work within its current understanding of its mandate. It has made a good submission on Building for Climate Change but perhaps we members might think about showing leadership in matters in which our trade is complicit and about which we have a duty to speak out.

In the absence of the Institute seizing the day, it will be left to privateers like the Architects Declare initiative, whose voluntary commitment to the maintenance of life on earth is carried out in the midnight hour and is inevitably compromised by a shortage of time and resources. Now, surely, is the hour to lift our Institute’s sights and demonstrate leadership in the design and construction communities in respect of this most pressing of issues.