Frances Moore Lappé is the author and co-author of 18 books, including Diet For a Small Planet, which has sold over three million copies worldwide. She is the co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute, a collaborative network for research and popular education that seeks to bring democracy to life. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And she is the winner of the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, “for revealing the political and economic causes of world hunger and how citizens can help to remedy them.”
Her most recent book, EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want, won a silver medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Environment/Ecology/Nature category. In it she argues that our capacity for getting things done is impeded by several “thought traps.” These thought traps frame our understanding of environmental challenges so as to produce fear and hopelessness. But we can break free of this inner climate of despair by seeing opportunities and learning to think like an ecosystem. Thus, we can bridge the gap between “the world we long for and the world we thought we were stuck with” through a series of “thought leaps” that might transform our lives and world.
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THEO HORESH: You have written extensively about some of the ways thinking on environmental challenges become what you call “thought-traps.” What is a thought trap, and how do thought-traps hold us back from thinking effectively about environmental challenges?
FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ: A thought-trap is my term for a negative piece of our mental map… The dominant mental map today, determining what we can see and what we cannot see, is fundamentally life destroying. And at its core is the premise of scarcity… We now are living in cultures trapped in a mechanical worldview in which reality is characterized by separateness, stasis, and scarcity. We are separate from one another in a ceaseless battle over scarcity. The first and overarching thought-trap is the idea that there are not enough goods—meaning everything from energy to food, nor enough goodness in human beings…
We have hit the limits of the destruction and waste humanity can inflict without horrific loss and suffering. But that is very different from what is often heard: that we have hit the limits of nature’s capacity to meet human needs. In no way is the latter true. Think of the extreme inefficiency built into our food system: three-quarters of all agricultural land is funneled into producing animal foods but they supply only 16 percent of our calories. Identifying nature’s limits as the constraint diverts our eyes from nature’s capacities. Plus, one in every four food calories that is produced is literally wasted. And that does not include the calories “wasted” when people eat more than their bodies can healthfully use.
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Theo: It seems like a lot of what you are doing in Eco-Mind is bringing people’s thinking back to balance.
Frances: And the key is a very simple shift from a framing of, “We have hit the limits,” to a framing of alignment, aligning with nature and with human nature so our needs are met as natural systems thrive. Currently we are creating societies perversely aligned with both. As we align our economies with nature’s regenerative laws, and acknowledge both the negative and the positive in our own nature, we can create societies to bring forth the best in us. We can see a future we want… “We have hit the limits of nature” ends up backfiring. If people believe there is not enough, they become more possessive. I feel strongly that we need metaphors about aligning with nature. We can explain and show that our economic rules and institutions are now violating nature, destroying its generative power, and we can progressively align with nature to meet human needs.
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Theo: We have interviewed George Lakoff, and he tends to lay out carefully constructed linguistic frames on single issues, which he builds up into interlocking systems of frames. But your project looks more like a massive reframing within ourselves, with the intention of coming back into alignment.
Frances: The task is very much an internal reframing, as well as a reframing of the issues, absolutely… What we believe about ourselves matters enormously. That is why I spend a lot of time in the book exploring evidence for what brings out the best in us: what brings forth our pro-social qualities, now identified through new anthropology and neuroscience. We are learning that humans have deeply engrained capacities for cooperation, for empathy, for shared intentionality. And yet we also know, like any organism in an ecosystem, that we respond to context. And so whether those qualities are expressed, or our capacity for brutality comes out, depends on social context…
But if you take the eco-mind idea, that we reframe our own nature, then we can align our own nature with the conditions that bring out the best in us. These include the continuous dispersion of power, transparency in human relationships, letting go of the blame-game, and accepting common, mutual accountability. We know that under those conditions the best in us is likely to show up a whole lot more often. And what a relief that this approach does not require changing human nature.
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Theo: With your 1971 bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, you became one of the earliest environmentalists to promote eating less meat. This is a very intimate issue for many people, who struggle with the ethics of whether or not to eat meat. How has your thinking on this issue evolved?
Frances: The initial impetus was just to share with people the idea that we are creating scarcity out of plenty and that this is not inevitable; there is no scarcity… You mean the experts are telling us we are running out of food, but actually we are feeding so much of it to animals that we shrink it to a small percentage of what can nourish us? That does not make any sense… It was just a very raw sort of wake-up.
And then I re- wrote Diet for a Small Planet in 1975 and tried to make even clearer the idea that a grain-fed, meat-centered diet is simply an outcome of a social-political-economic ideology that concentrates power, so much so that billions of people do not have the economic power to make market demand grain-to-consumer directly. Rather, the grain is made so cheap that it makes perfect economic sense to feed it to livestock and create what is a luxury product for many people instead. So, I tried to explain more clearly that the problem is not meat per se, it is what we can learn by studying the grain-fed, meat-centered diet.
I wanted people to register that there is nothing inevitable about it, nothing good for our health about it, nothing good for the environment about it, nothing good for poor people about it. It was just something that was created by an economic system that returns wealth-to-wealth-to-wealth, until we have such inequality that today only 43 percent of the grain produced in the world goes directly to humans. And now we know the livestock industry is a huge contributor to climate change as well.
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Theo: It seems to be another one of those areas where so many things can come into alignment at once. We come into greater alignment with ourselves, we come into greater alignment with animals, we come into greater alignment with the environment, with hungry people. There are just so many issues that can be impacted through this one choice, with each supporting the others in a sort of virtuous cycle.
Frances: Not to mention the fun of creativity in the plant world. That is where the variety is, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of choices in terms of fruits, vegetables, root-crops, nuts, seeds, all different kinds of grains. It is just endless varieties of things that you can combine to create wonderful meals, as opposed to sticking with meat in the center of the plate and plopping down the vegetables. I just find it so endlessly exciting to be a cook in the world of plant foods.
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Theo: You are quite critical of quantitative thinking, and yet this seems to be the only way for both scientists and economists writing about climate change to think clearly about how minute changes today might add up over say, the next 100 years or so. Thinking quantitatively is also perhaps the best way to discover what will be most effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By paying close attention to the greenhouse-gases emitted for heating buildings, driving, or bringing food to market, for instance, we can get a good sense of what to prioritize. How might we make the most of these quantitative approaches to thinking about the climate challenge while bringing to our thinking the kind of qualitative approach that allows us to also see the world through the lens of an eco-mind?
Frances: That is a great question. First, it is not either/or, because clearly I deal with the quantitative all the time. But what is the qualitative implication of the quantitative? That is the question. I just gave a speech at the World Food Prize event, where Monsanto and Syngenta were honored. My talk was a very direct challenge to productivism. I am in no way saying production does not matter; no, of course, we have to produce enough food. But how that quantity is produced and who has power over what is produced are relational questions. All of that involves seeing the relational implications of different types of seeds and actual farming practices. If that seed is patented, and it is controlled by an oligopoly, that in and of itself determines a lot of the relational consequences: dependency versus symmetry in human relationships. So, I am not in any way denigrating the need for quantitative analysis and for quantities of food. I am asking us always to put the quantities in a relational context, asking what are the relational implications.
Theo: How would you respond to those desperate environmentalists, who think that it is already too late to save the planet from destruction?
Frances: It is not possible to know what is possible, so I do not describe myself as an optimist or a pessimistic, but as a possiblist. And I think if we are going to take up room on the planet, then we might as well recognize that the nature of life is continuous change. It can be glacial in its pace or surprisingly speedy, so staying in this place of possibility is my everyday challenge. And it seems to me most appropriate, given what we are coming to understand about the nature of life—that we really do not know. And all we can know is that if we do nothing, if we just continue on this track that is so deadly for us and other species, it is not going to turn out well. But our species has never been here before, conscious of a threat to its very existence.
I just turned 70, so I have now lived through an era in which there was no consciousness that we were creating our own demise. Now, for growing numbers, it is an everyday understanding that the path is undoing the very foundation of life… Hitler was alive when I was born, so for me it does not seem like that long ago. In my lifetime, Germany was the pariah in the world. It was the fascist horror. And yet today Germany is a powerful example of leadership at so many levels, certainly in terms of the environment. How did that come to be? Nobody would have predicted it. I would not have predicted it. That is humbling, and it is a thought that keeps alive my mantra that “it is not possible to know what is possible.”
We have never been here before, ever. And we do not know what the consequences could be, how quickly we could break out of old patterns. In other times in life, we have seen how an enemy, in the negative sense of an enemy in war, can bring a people together. Natural disasters also bring people together. If we can transform the global poverty and climate-change challenge into an emergency breaking us out of our old differences and preoccupations and pettiness—as can happen in emergencies—then we do not know.
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For more click: The Impact of Food on Climate Change: a Dialogue with Frances Moore Lappé. {Book Excerpt}
This article is an excerpt from The Inner Climate: Global Warming from the Inside Out. If you liked it, pleasefollow me on Facebook.
Bonus: Walk the Talk Show: One Take: In the Moment with Frances Moore Lappé. How We Can Save our Earth:
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Author: Theo Horesh
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