Aspiring scientists are encouraged to "think outside the box", but when someone actually does - as I have - and discovers something that doesn't fit nicely into any of the existing boxes, they tend to be ignored or ridiculed.

I have been working on a anthropological approach to the problem of mankind achieving sustainability on his finite and vulnerable planet.

Man's behaviour evolved over millions of years to serve the survival and advantage of individuals and their family groups in the natural environment; it has had little or no time to adapt to the much larger social units of civilisation, which only developed in the past few thousand years. It is no wonder that our efforts to solve global problems are so inadequate.

Man is not a fallen angel, but an animal, Earth's Greatest (aspiring) Ape, who greatly and dangerously overestimates his powers of understanding and reason; misled, perhaps, by our scientific name: Homo sapiens, indeed!  The failure to acknowledge, or even remotely recognise, the extent of our own blindness and irrationality (particularly amongst scientists) is currently the biggest threat to human survival.

The other important thing I have recognised from outside the box is that the natural environment has effectively been replaced by an artificial "socio-economic environment " (where we ALL have, and depend on, our niches) as the focus of our behavioural programming, which modern capitalism has developed and been honed to take advantage of, thus explaining why we persist in giving priority to the economy (the household of man) rather than to ecology (the household of our planet), when it is obvious (were we not in a state of collective denial, and afraid of biting the hand that feeds us) that for human survival it has to be the other way around.

The truth - which far from fitting into any boxes, threatens to rupture or sweep many of them away (thus, the massive resistance to facing up to it) - is that our growth-dependent economy and the grossly materialistic way of life it engenders are both rooted in our primitive, animal nature and fundamentally unsustainable. Unsurprisingly, in view of what Darwin is supposed to have taught us about human origins.

Such a anthropological approach to sustainability urgently needs to be taken up and developed, so that it can be presented to the scientific, and then the wider community, in preparation for the radical changes needed (not just to our economy and way of life, but also to many of the values, attitudes and aspirations - rooted in our animal nature - which underlie them) in order to achieve sustainability, before a ruthless mother nature does it for us.