There is a remarkable free film available online for all those who have 93 minutes to spare, and if they haven’t, then they should try to find it as it is a very informative and challenging way to spend an hour-and-a-half. It’s a pity that a computer is needed to watch it, but for the many who can, it has much to say.

It’s called Home, shot by a French photographer, and is sponsored by a multi-national company. He set up a Good Planet environmental organisation and found ways of offsetting all the CO2 produced by the helicopters used in the photography. Despite being expensive to make, the film is available free of charge as it aims to get its message across to as wide an audience as possible – it’s been on television in Europe and India, but not in the UK.

It uses mind-blowing photography to make an impressive visual impact, with quite stunning aerial views of both natural and man-made scenery to give us a global perspective of what we are doing to a magnificent planet. He challenges the fact that we are generally only concerned with the small part of the planet where we live and the film emphasises that ‘home’ is the whole planet.

It starts with the natural world, the molten volcanic early years, the changing atmosphere with algae and plants reducing the CO2 and giving us oxygen, all leading to trees and the development of soil. The world we take for granted is finely-balanced and fragile, and worked very well until we came along and started imposing ourselves in our ignorance.

The story of this impact is told with a wide selection of examples.

The intensive irrigation and reaping of rice is impressive, but it then becomes intrusive and destructive with pictures of mechanised cereal and cotton growing, the hoovering of fish from the sea, cattle in pens without a blade of grass, massive nightscapes of motorway junctions, forests of lit skyscrapers, Dubai towers and houses built on artificial islands, ships stacked with Lego-like containers, destroyed forests, endless palm oil plantations and the Somme-like landscape of the Canadian tar sands.

Our efforts are picked out with challenging summaries – 20 per cent own 80 per cent of the resources, 12 times more is spent on the military than on aid, one billion don’t have clean drinking water, 13 million hectares of forest disappear annually, 75 per cent of fishing grounds are nearing exhaustion, 40 per cent of farmland is degraded, and there could be 250 million climate refugees by 2050.

The challenge for this century is to stop damaging the planet and learn to live in partnership with it.