Ronnie Wright's Page

I'm the Brisbane Office and Volunteer Coordinator for Oxfam Australia.

If my friends were to describe me in one word that word would be compassionate.

I’m a passionate activist for the rights of people, animals and the environment.

James Lovelock’s theory of Gaia is how I view our world. This planet does not belong to humans; we share it with all the other inhabitants (animals, plants, rivers, etc.). We are only one part of the web of life that makes up our world.

Our planetary resources are infinite; our society is unsustainable. Failure to change our society, and head in a direction that is sustainable, will result in a total collapse of our civilization.

We must stop choosing greed over need and take action to protect our world for future generations.

It is the attitude that we can conquer, control or use nature any way we see fit that has gotten us into the mess we are in today.

What we need is a paradigm shift in the way we view nature. That shift is happening all over the world and is being carried forward by the Cultural Creatives. Let us hope that this shift will take place before it’s too late for human kind.

I think that we need to adopt the eight principles of Deep Ecology which are:

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.

4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

Time is short; we must act decisively and we must act now!

Ronnie Wright
World Change Cafe