Frances Moore Lappé
What an extraordinary time to be alive. We're the first people on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest. Yet on every continent a revolution in human dignity is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose death; or we can choose life.Collection: Time
Every choice we make can be a celebration of the world we want.Collection: Choices
The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.Collection: Food
I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."Collection: Book
Hunger is a people-made phenomenon, so the central issue is power: the power of those who make the decisions about what is grown and who, or what, it's grown for.Collection: Issues
Our heavily meat-centered culture is at the very heart of our waste of the earth's productivity.Collection: Food
Hope is not what we find in evidence, it's what we become in action.Collection: Action
I learned this [ that fear doesn't have to stop me] when my world came apart. I was living a life-long dream of a family life combined with an organization to promote living democracy - all on a gorgeous 45-acre compound in rural Vermont. I'd spent a decade building my dream, and then it started to crumble, piece by piece - my marriage, my organization, my confidence.Collection: Dream
We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.Collection: Oil
Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.Collection: Motivational
Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.Collection: Democracy
Many families participate in the Community Supported Agriculture movement, which allows a family to buy shares in a farmer's produce so that they know where their food is coming from, and they can take their families out and see the farm and meet the farmer. That movement has helped create a new culture around food.Collection: Agriculture
The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.Collection: Real
Freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.Collection: Intelligent
The spirit that I am advocating is reframing how we view the world, and shifting from the negativity of lack and "not enough" to the positive frame of aligning with Nature.Collection: Views
I think that fear of embarrassment is the essence of the human challenge.Collection: Thinking
My path has not been smooth. But the great thing about getting to be an elder is that you can look back and see the intense times of confusion and challenge, and see that if you keep walking through them, they can lead to times of great satisfaction and reward.Collection: Confusion
Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.Collection: Fear Of Death
This is the first generation to know that the choices we're making have ultimate consequences. It's a time when you either choose life or you choose death ... Going along with the current order means that you're choosing death.Collection: Health
After the journey around the world, writing Hope's Edge, I began to see that it is not possible to know what's possible - and therein lies our freedom.Collection: Lying
Despite a tenfold increase in the use of pesticides between 1947 and 1974 (in the US), crop losses due to pests have...remained at an estimated 33%. Losses due to insects alone have nearly doubled, ...from 7% in the 1942-1951 period to about 13% in 1974.Collection: Dark
I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.Collection: Roots
I understand, of course, that grain-fed meat is not the cause of the world hunger problem - and eating some of it doesn't directly take food out of the mouths of starving people - but it is, to me, a symbol and a symptom of the basic irrationality of a food system that's divorced from human needs. Therefore, using less meat can be an important way to take responsibility. Making conscious choices about what we eat, based on what the earth can sustain and what our bodies need, can help remind us that our whole society must begin to balance sustainable production with human need.Collection: Responsibility
For me hope isn't wishful thinking or blind faith about the future. It's a stance toward life - one of curiosity and humility.Collection: Humility
You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money... It's understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system - not scarcity - creates worldwide hunger for millions of people.Collection: Food
Hope is a stance, not an assessment.Collection: Faith
I think back to when I was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s, during the [John] McCarthy era, with two parents who founded a Unitarian Church. We lived in a little frame house, and my bedroom was just down the hall from the kitchen. My favorite memories of childhood are of the smell of coffee wafting into my bedroom as my parents and their friends talked about the big, important things - about racism and about how to move our country to live its values.Collection: Country
We didn't evolve to be passive victims or shoppers.Collection: Victim
Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities.Collection: Compassion
[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home.Collection: Freedom
Every time you take a step and walk with your fear, you'll never know the impact. But you can be certain somebody's watching, and that courage is contagious.Collection: Impact
Each of us carries within us a worldview, a set of assumptions about how the world works - what some call a paradigm - that forms the very questions we allow ourselves to ask, and determines our view of future possibilities.Collection: Views
If we start with "limits" and a premise of scarcity and fear, it makes us fearful of each other, and that makes us vulnerable to anti-democratic systems.Collection: Scarcity
Imagine sitting down to an eight ounce steak, and then, imagine the room filled wit 45 to 50 people with empty bowls...For the feed cost of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a cup pf cooked cereal grains.Collection: Animal
Relationships are the core message of ecology.Collection: Messages
Making conscious choices about what we eat, based on what the earth can sustain and what our bodies need, can help remind us that our whole society must begin to balance sustainable production with human need.Collection: Choices
Individuality doesn't just mean individualism-standing alone. It means developing one's unique gifts, and being able to share them for the enjoyment of oneself and others.Collection: Mean
Breaking with the pack may be exactly what we should be doing. Saying "no" to the dominant culture that is trapping us in destructive ways of living might be the most life-serving thing we can do.Collection: Culture
When we say we have "hit the limits," we are saying that nature is the problem, when in fact the limits we have hit are the limits of destruction and waste, not nature.Collection: Waste
What is different and exciting is how much we have learned. We learned we were right that we don't need the chemical model of agriculture. We know so much more about the life of soil now and we understand how plants synergistically work together with microbes and animals to create healthy conditions.Collection: Animal
There are surprising turning points; there is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and you never know if your action could be the straw.Collection: Camels
That's what happened when my own life crumbled. The people who came into my life bolstered me to take more risks, to be even more true to myself.Collection: People
Nature is with us if we can learn how to align with it and not break the basic laws that generate life.Collection: Law
I think we are at a new evolutionary stage. We evolved in tight-knit tribes in which we faced death if we didn't have the support of the rest of the tribe.Collection: Thinking
Nature has an incredible capacity for regeneration and growth, but we can't experience it if we stay fearful and focused on lack.Collection: Growth
I get goose-bumps when you talk about Diane Wilson. Who knows where she found that courage? When she was a child, she would crawl under the bed when a stranger came to the house. But in 1989, she found out that her county in south Texas was ranked worst in the country for toxic waste. She wondered if the effluent, dumped into the waters where she and her family had shrimped for generations, might be responsible for the dwindling fish populations. And she suspected that her son's autism might be related to the pollution.Collection: Country
We hear, "Oh, we need to patent GMOs and develop new strains and new chemicals because Nature can't provide what we need." I have to debate people all the time who say that Nature can't provide enough.Collection: Gmos
I think of Wangari Mathai in Kenya. If she started out saying she wanted to plant 20 million trees, she would have been laughed at. In fact, the foresters and the government did laugh at her. They said, "Villagers? Un-schooled villagers? Planting trees? No, no, no, it takes foresters." So she planted trees anyway.Collection: Thinking
Our food system takes abundant grain,which people can't afford,and shrinks it into meat,which better-off people will pay for.Collection: Vegetarianism
Honest hope has an edge. It's messy. It requires that we let go of all pat answers, all preconceived formulas, all confidence that our sailing will be smooth. It's not a resting point. Honest hope is movement.Collection: Inspirational