Editor's Note: Today we welcome Christina Newnham to the writing team. As the post indicates, Christina writes out of Queenstown, New Zealand, and will be covering topics related to energy and buildings. Welcome Christina!

I live in Queenstown, New Zealand… the ‘shaky isles’, but in a town where the force of nature is felt all too often, how is it that the populous of my town appear to have forgotten that they are a part of this nature and that it is not simply there for their pleasure? Why do we fail to see the upshot of the things we do upon the rest of nature? Why do we feel no remorse about driving a choking vehicle through NZ’s pristine West Coast rainforests? Where has our connection with nature gone and how can we get it back; why do we need to get it back?

When the first settlers arrived in Queenstown, all they had was the natural environment around them. However, what did they do? In true Victorian style, they saw it only as a resource and destroyed it to meet their own human needs; deforestation, agriculture, etc. When the gold rush arrived, this mentality escalated and continued into the present day. Today, surrounded by mountains, lakes and forests, Queenstown sits like an oasis of human desire, nestled away nearly 200 kilometres from the nearest large settlement. Yet, it has seemingly no connection with its natural surroundings, other than ‘popping out into the wilderness’ for an ‘experience’ or to walk the dog, bike, ski, etc. Indeed, Queenstown is certainly not the most environmentally conscious town, but why so, when it is constantly reminded of the natural environment from being surrounded by it?

There is a relatively new school of thought emerging and gaining strength, that believes that our disrespect for the planet arises from our growing disassociation with ‘more than human’ nature. We have lost our psychological and spiritual interconnection with nature and therefore do not see ourselves as part of it; not feeling as strongly as our forefathers perhaps did about it. This idea is called ecopsychology and is a combination of ecology and psychology, focusing on the environmental and human interaction, in an attempt to understand why we are on a self-destruct mission. By delving deeper into the human psyche, it hopes to find out the reasons for this detachment from nature and thus how we can repair this relationship. It believes that by healing our minds into once again feeling part of nature, we will feel a want and need to protect the planet we live and depend on.

So, why is Queenstown no better, and in many ways, worse behaving towards the environment than many major cities? Indeed, you can go nowhere in the town without seeing mountains, lakes and forests. The answer therefore has to be more deeply rooted than simply seeing nature.

I believe the answer lies in our third skin; our first being our skin, our second the clothes we wear and our third the buildings we spend so much time in. Of course, we go camping, hiking, biking etc., but these are all temporary and we soon retreat into the ‘safety’ of buildings, whether this be to shelter from the weather, for security or to simply be surrounded by our comfortable human-made environment.

How then can we come to a happy compromise? How can we blur the boundary that is stopping us from once again being part of the rest of nature, without removing our basic need of shelter, or compromising the comforts we have become used to? This is a question I leave open for further discussion in another article, but the issue remains: in order to reverse our raping of the planet, we need to re-build our connection with the other living things upon it and once again know what it feels like to be a happy, integral part of the ecosystem and not its enemy.