"I'm just blown away by Te Ao Māori, lots of aspects, including how they see the land, trees, animals all as their relations," said our friend. "You know, humans being related to everything in the environment rather than thinking they are the owners or need to dominate it."

"I've always thought we are connected to everything in the environment," I replied.

"How come?"

"Because I'm an earth scientist. A very short history of the evolution of life starts 3.7 billion years ago, 800 million years after the Earth formed. First, bacteria evolved from the chemical soup covering the planet – chemicals joined together to form the origins of all life. Roll on time – plants and animals evolve, move from the sea onto land. By 423 million years ago, the majority of life forms around today existed. Humans took a long time to turn up – the first hominids evolved 6 to 7 million years ago, the first Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago. However, it's not so important how long any particular species has been around, but how every living organism is related to every other organism through their ancestors, and also to the non-living."

"Oh," our friend said. "I never did earth science."

Our friend probably did have a segment of earth science, and most likely also evolution, in compulsory high school science. However, the paradigms clearly didn't stick for her. In her adult life, she has rediscovered the concept of the connections between everything through Te Ao Māori. Realising those connections is a good thing, whichever way you come at it. However, it was a salutary reminder to me that many people don't have the embedded concept of everything being related to everything else; in the western world, we are much more likely to have embedded the concept of 'special' humans dominating everything else.

We're at a crux point on our planet where people are slowly waking up to the importance of everything non-human, or 'more-than-human'. In a small example, we refer to people making cheese. However, the more-than-human has a huge role in making cheese – the sun provides energy, bacteria in the soil feed plants, plants feed cows, cows produce milk, bacteria in the milk turn it into cheese...When we forget the more-than-human we forget we are part of a web of relationships and those relationships are essential to our survival. While we may know the importance of the more-than-human intellectually, an increasingly tiny fraction of the planet know the importance of the more-than-human viscerally, as we become ever more physically separate from our environment.

An earth science colleague recently posted on Linked In to say there is a shortage of earth science graduates and we need more people studying earth sciences to fill the many necessary roles, including finding solutions to climate change and providing the materials humans require to continue their 'modern lives'. After the discussion with our friend this week, I went back to the Linked In post and commented:

"The real reason we need people to study earth science [or Te Ao Māori, or any other philosophy which is not human-centric] is to understand the history of the earth, the connections between every living thing and the blink of an eye that are human beings."