Re: ‘Stifling business not way forward' (The Sun, August 15). What G Clark fails to understand is that the environment is not an expendable nice-to-have. The environment is everything. Full stop. We humans have developed the daft idea that the economy is everything.

Imagine a circle labelled ‘economy' inside put another large circle and label it ‘humans' and beside this put a tiny circle labelled ‘environment'.

The diagram illustrates the way G Clark believes the world functions; it is what will guide his vote. Follow the dream – stuff, stuff, and more stuff – it supports the economy.

The cost of this dream is a world where rivers are too polluted to swim in, ground water too contaminated to drink, and species going extinct at thousands of times the background rate.

Raw materials needed to supply this endless stream of stuff are rapidly running out and anthropogenic global warming is resulting in increasing climate change, running the risk of ultimately making Earth uninhabitable for humans and other species.

At least we'll leave a very large pile of stuff behind, as a memorial to a species too human-centered to see reality - that we live in a finite world with finite resources. Now to the reality.

Imagine a huge circle and label it ‘environment'. Inside put a very small circle and label it ‘humans' - for that's what we are, a small part of an enormous picture. A blip, time-wise, in Earth's history.

Inside this ‘human' circle put a smaller circle and label it ‘economy' - for the economy is only one aspect of human life, not its be all and end all.

The Greens' policies are based on this second diagram; the picture of how the world really works.

Their policies support humans living in this real world, and in the process start to fix so many problems humans have created. I know which party I'll be voting for come the election; the one that bases it's policies on reality.

G Oakbrook, Welcome Bay.