The second priority of survival (after Air) is shelter and in the Perfect Rucksack circle of elements this falls under the title of Earth. Depending on the circumstances we can only last about four hours without adequate shelter from either heat or cold. Shelter enables us to cope with changes of temperature between night and day that although modest in many places, is still significant enough to have to pay attention to. After a hot and sunny day on the beach, the air temperature drops rapidly as the sun sets. Even if your shelter is just putting on a jumper, that jumper still came from the Earth one way or another.

In more long-term extreme situations we will rely on the earth itself to provide shelter or to use the resources it gives us to build them. Our brick and concrete structures are all created literally from earth, baked clay blocks and sand and gravel. Even the towering glass offices that seem to epitomise our mastery of building are constructed from metal ore and sand.

Joanna & I live in a little thatched cottage that was built about 400 years ago, it has an oak frame made from trees that were saplings when Henry VII was on the throne, wattle & daub walls (wood & Mud) and a 2 foot thick grass roof (straw thatch) it’s little more than an elaborate debris hut but somehow we forget that & think of it as a ‘house’.

Earth is a big subject here at Perfect Rucksack. It is everything that isn't Air, Water or Fire. Here, Earth encompasses the physical rock and structure of the planet but also every organism that grows on it and every precious resource above and below the surface.
It is interesting to me that we call our planet ‘Earth’ and refer to the soil with the same word. When we walk on the soil we walk on our Earth.

This Earth provides us with everything we will ever need and more th. It provides the essential components of life, and in the general context of ‘Mother Earth’ that includes water and air too. The Earth really is our mother, it gave us life. It is a Goldilocks planet, just the right size and orbiting at just the right distance from just the right kind of star, not too hot and not too cold. Earth is an extraordinary place where life is the default setting. Life springs from every possible place, from every nook and crevice of this little blue planet. Without this place the creatures that we call you and I wouldn’t exist.

At its core Perfect Rucksack is about interacting with this Earth.

If, by some extraordinary quirk of physics, chemistry and cosmology, we exist as a spark of consciousness in the Universe I think we should feel ourselves lucky that it happened here, on this most beautiful of planets and we owe it to ourselves to experience it to the best of our ability while we are here and to leave it an even better place for those who follow.