EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think
to Create the World We Want
As a 20-something in graduate school, Frances Moore Lappé was perplexed about why global hunger remained a persistent problem. She sat in the agriculture library on the campus of UC Berkeley, trying to find the answer and was stunned by what she found.
“And I realized, ‘Oh my God--there is enough food in the world to feed us all,’” she said. “And then I learned that we are actually creating the scarcity that we say we fear.”
That revelation and the work it inspired later became her first book, Diet for a Small Planet, which has since gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In the years since, Moore Lappé has refined her vision and started asking a larger question: “Why are we together creating a world that we as individuals would never choose?”
Her address at Agriculture for Life described why so many pressing problems, like hunger and climate change, often seem impossible to solve. She laid out a way for people to achieve change by participating in democracy.
A CYCLE OF POWERLESSNESS
Moore Lappé said people often develop a “mental map” which helps them understand their world. Today, “the dominant mental map that we absorb daily in this country” is “fundamentally life-denying.”
Too often, she said, discussions of social problems involve people competing over scarce resources--for example by believing not enough food or energy are available for all the world’s people--ideas Moore Lappé does not accept.
“This thought system leaves us feeling powerless, and I love to say that that’s the only thing we really have to worry about--not climate change, not soil erosion, not hunger in the world, but our sense of powerlessness,” Moore Lappé said.
“The solutions to all of these terrible problems are known, it’s just that most of us feel powerless to manifest those solutions.”
THE ECO-MIND
Moore Lappé suggested replacing this negative thought process with a new one she called the “EcoMind.” Instead of separation among people and scarcity, this new perspective focuses on the connection between people and the idea that we are all working together to create reality at every moment.
Using this perspective helps people feel more empowered and create an “open, fair and democratic” marketplace, Moore Lappé said.
Agriculture and food figure prominently in Moore Lappe's plan for an eco-minded future. She said agriculture should be less concerned with increasing production, focusing instead on "the relationships of power that allow people to access what we are creating.”
In addition to hunger, Moore Lappe suggested agriculture provided opportunities to take on other problems as well, including climate change. She cited evidence that re-localizing the food system, incorporating better ecological practices, and bringing livestock back into farming could cut greenhouse gases significantly.
YOUR ROLE
Moore Lappé argued that humans are capable of both great cruelty and tremendous good. She said society’s challenge in creating a more “eco-minded” perspective is to create the right conditions for people to work together and cooperate.
Much of this effort involves how people participate in democratic government, she said.
She pointed to a culture of concentrated power, secrecy, and people blaming one another for problems as being qualities that bring out the worst in people and do not solve anything.
An “eco-minded” system would instead focus on cooperation, transparency and mutual accountability, Moore Lappé said. She called on her audience to expect these values in government and to participate themselves. “Democracy is not what we have, it’s what we do,” she said.
Moore Lappé said that becoming more involved in Democracy means rethinking our perceptions of fear and power. Fear, she said, can be an energy that pushes you to keep going. And individuals have power because every time they choose to act--or remain silent--others will notice and react in kind.
According to Moore Lappé solving the key problems of our time will also involve reaching to the root cause of the dilemma, the tremendous amount of money in politics. Part of bringing positive change must involve taking on that core issue, she said.
As she closed her talk, Moore Lappé encouraged the audience to set aside cynical thoughts. She cited numerous examples from her own career of positive changes she thought were impossible--but that actually happened.
“If we truly embrace an eco-mind, with its premise of co-creation and continuous change,” she said, then “it is not possible to know what’s possible... we are free to go for the world we want.”
After Moore Lappé addressed the audience, Ricardo Salvador took the stage to provide a historical perspective about how agriculture in Iowa developed as it did.
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