A major shortcoming of human beings is their lack of perspective – they concentrate too much on the present and the immediate future, and have little understanding of their parents’ past, let alone centuries and millennia further back. The result is an over-inflated sense of importance, or indeed hubris – that is an overweening arrogance.

In just over a hundred years, we have changed from gas lamps, horse-drawn trams and restrictions on women voting to a society that twitters, owns cars, considers flying normal and has personal computers. Whether all of this is progress is debatable, but it’s certain that not enough folk have much understanding about the importance of the change.

The wealth created since the Industrial Revolution began more than two centuries ago has been enormous, and most of us have benefited, though there is still resistance to sharing it out more equally. This concentration on growth, and the continued increase in consumption, acts as a barrier to the understanding of our relationship with the planet we live on and ensures that we will act in a self-interested tribal way and settle disputes by force. Not much progress there, then.

I suppose I am arguing the case for much greater awareness of where we live, and what shaped it and us, and all our endeavours, and I often wonder what folk notice as they move around Bradford. I see much that tells a story that began 300 million years ago and now talks boldly to me. The stone of the buildings, and the natural flagstones, come from the Carboniferous period, when the Elland and Gaisby sandstones were laid down in shallow tropical seas while the United Kingdom was positioned over the Equator. Among these rocks are the ‘earths’ that led to the fireclay industry in Thornton and the various coal and ironstone beds that powered our industries and gave rise to the iron works at Low Moor. The iron-rich orange water in the Heaton Woods stream is another reminder.

More recently, the Ice Age left its mark, with the terminal moraines in Bingley and Hirst Wood, and overflow channels as melt water poured from one valley to another, carving out Chellow Dene, Northcliffe Woods, Heaton Woods and the steep-sided hollow at Odsal that’s the home of Bradford Bulls. And while we worry about the electoral system and the price of petrol, we are on a globe that is spinning at more than a thousand miles an hour as it hurtles round the sun even faster. We, and the planet we live on, are very special. We need to be more aware of our capacity to damage it and so threaten our own well-being.