Help sustain that circle of life

Earth is not infinite, says John Milnes

There was a movie a while ago, The Lion King, which had the song, Circle of Life:

Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life.

This song is more than just appropriate for a movie, but an apt description of the complexity and inter-connectedness of the life-sustaining soils, seas and atmosphere of our planet.

When we are within this thin layer of life, it seems huge and unending, but seen within the context of the whole planet it is a tiny proportion of our Earth.

I recently watched a documentary on Maori Television about the Moon landings with interviews with the crews with really amazing photos and film taken on the flights. Some of the most awe-inspiring images were those looking back at planet Earth - lots of blue ocean, with multi-coloured land and swirling clouds.

These pictures of that "small" blue planet suspended in the vast blackness of space brought emotional comments from the Apollo crews. It also had many Earth-bound people thinking about the isolation and vulnerability apparent in those iconic images.

We seem to have forgotten these images, and the reminder about how we only have one home, beautiful, but still quite delicate.

From our earthbound perspective our planet appears so vast that it seems that we could have no possibility of upsetting this balance.

These images of our home are of a sphere of life. A circle of life.

So where are we going wrong? The individual human is not the problem; it is the mass of humanity that adds up to a major problem.

As with climate change, for example, one individual makes no noticeable difference, but multiply one by billions and the effect upsets the balance; the circle of life begins to wobble. Too much wobble and the wheels could fall off.

The natural environment is the epitome of recycling, keeping the environment in a state of balance, but we have created a broken circle, turning energy into greenhouse gases upsetting the climate, turning other minerals into stuff which we use briefly and then bury in landfills. More of this landfill could have returned to the soil, but we put it in landfills out of circulation for centuries or longer.

Look again at the images of Earth from space, it isn't infinite, and it is time to consider how we are treating our home.

If we reduce, reuse and recycle in every sense of the term we'll be more in tune with the earth.

We need to find our proper place in the circle of life, or the circle of life could become a spiral of destruction.

John Milnes was the Green Party candidate in the past three general elections, and conservation is still very important to him. He is also a trustee of Sustainable Whanganui.