Having just read Deep Ecology for the 21st Century – edited by George Sessions, I thought I would share a couple of items that jumped out at me.

“To achieve a viable human-earth community, a new legal system must take as its primary task, to articulate the conditions for the integral functioning of the earth process with special reference to mutually enhancing human-earth relationship.”

“A healing of the earth is now a prerequisite for the healing of the human. Adjustment of the human to the conditions and restraints of the natural world constitutes the primary medical prescription for human well-being”.

“It is our efforts to establish a thoroughly sanitized world that have led to our toxic world. We have invented a counterproductive society that is now caught in a the loop that feeds back into itself in what can presently be considered a runaway situation.”

(Think of Council chopping down our urban trees because pavements are cracked or developers want the space)

“The communications media are particularly responsible… Producer and consumer feed each other in a ever-accelerating process until we experience an enormous glut of basic products. Efforts are made to mitigate the evil effects…. yet all of this is trivial in relation to the magnitude of the problem. So too are the regulatory efforts of the government, these are microphase solutions for macrophase problems.”

“The reason why most of old-paradigm ethics cannot deal with these problems is that it is anthropocentric. Thus the most important task for a new school of ethics will be to develop a non-anthropocentric theory of value, a theory that would confer inherent value on the non-human form of life. ”

(I know the Maori expression, ‘it is the people, people, people’ is part of our cultural heritage but times have changed and it must now be prefaced by the planet, the planet, the planet, for therein lies our salvation)