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.
