IT IS part of human nature that we can focus only on things that are on a human scale. Every journalist understands that - the importance of finding the individual story of grief or heroism that will bring a report of tragedy to harrowing life. We can identify with one man's grief or courage: but switch off emotionally when confronted with the statistics of thousands of anonymous dead in a flood, drought or earthquake.

You have only to look at the way we have followed the search for missing ten-year-olds Holly Welsh and Jessica Chapman to understand that. The anguish of the two girls' parents has touched us all - and there can be few who did not breathe a genuine sigh of relief when the grim search of two mounds of earth in woods near Newmarket revealed they weren't Holly and Jessica's graves after all.

This ability to empathise with the grief and pain of other individuals helps bind communities together. Throughout our long history, it has served us well.

But in today's global society, when an industrialised and industrialising mankind can himself create problems on a global scale, it is no longer enough. And our inability to focus on the large scale, or to see the connection between our own individual actions and the global consequences they ultimately have, could be catastrophic.

The devastating floods in central Europe, and the brown cloud over Asia which threatens the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, does not touch us the way the anguish of Holly and Jessica's parents does. It is too distant, and we feel it has little to do with us.

When floods hit closer to home, as they did recently, we sit up and take notice. But we still make little connection between what is happening and the comfortable way we lead our own lives.

Those lives - because of the way our society is organised - are geared towards consumption. Everywhere, we're urged to spend, spend, spend. On clothes; on fashion products; on booze. On big new cars, exotic holidays or equally exotic foods imported from thousands of miles away by air.

We're made to feel this is acceptable, even desirable and necessary. Because 'we're worth it' in the words of the TV ad; and, possibly even more sinister, because it's good for the economy. Growth is a sign of a healthy economy, which guarantees jobs, income and security: and for there to be growth we all have a duty to spend.

It's horribly short-sighted. Because the gases released from the fossil fuels we burn digging out and transporting the natural resources we need to make the things we spend our money on are slowly poisoning our planet. And the by-products of our industrial processes - the ash, acids, chemical droplets and other 'particulates' - released into the air are doing the same. Look at the Asian cloud.

It's hard to make the connection between driving to work instead of walking - or coping with the stresses of modern life by indulging in a spot of 'retail therapy' - and what is happening on a global scale. There are two reasons. We're not wired up to make such connections, for one; focusing as we do on the small, the local, the intimate. And the relationship isn't a simple one, for another. Scientists themselves admit they have difficulty measuring exactly what man's true impact on his environment is.

But you can bet your bottom dollar there is one. And if we don't learn to accept that fact pretty soon, our children - or our children's children - may end up gasping for breath in a polluted world the way those fish in the wildlife documentaries gasp for oxygen as rivers dry up in the baking African plains.

Updated: 10:28 Thursday, August 15, 2002