WE human beings have an inflated sense of our own purpose and destiny, and a belief that the planet is there for us.

We think we are the chosen ones. We're uncomfortable with the notion that we're just another mammalian life form, and yet we display the normal animal characteristics of self preservation, reproduction, fighting and territorial ownership, with an added measure of greed and selfishness, albeit with a thin veneer of civilisation that frequently fails at both a personal and national level.

We struggle particularly with the concept of time, and a day or a year can seem never ending, so it's no wonder that we can't comprehend the life of our planet, when the Romans seem so long ago, and as for the pyramids they are almost pre-history.

This isn't surprising as all our development has been within the last ten thousand years, a blink in the passage of time. Even more recent has been the 200 years of scientific progress, and global communications.

Planet earth began four and a half billion years ago, 4,500,000,000, and it's now half way to burning up. During the last 500,000 years life has been almost extinguished at least five times, and we are currently making sure that it's threatened again with the sixth extinction.

The first five would have happened even if we had been around because asteroid impacts, vast outpourings of CO2 emitting lava covering continents, variations in the way that the planet wobbles on its axis, and continents changing position are all quite outside our control, but the sixth one is ours alone, as we are causing it with the indulgence of our life-styles.

The main difference between our effort and the previous massive changes is that we're if anything more effective, and faster, in achieving change. With them it was the big life forms that went first, such as the dinosaurs, and we are now killing off the remaining ones, the elephants, rhinos, hippos, and the big apes and cats, as the first step in our so called progress.

But additionally the small lifeforms, the butterflies, the birds, the fish, the insects and even smaller ones are now disappearing at at unprecedented rate, and we're also quite proficient in reducing our own numbers when others get in our way, or want something we think we own.

We are happy to glorify consumption, the bigger, shinier and faster the better, and we take little responsibility for the trees, the soil structure, and the quality of the water, because we know the price of everything and the value of little.

We mistakenly idolise wealth and property, so welcome to the expanding advertising corporate world, before it collapses.