Frances Moore Lappé
I don't rule anything out, and I couldn't underscore more the importance of what YES! is doing to show that there are people who are pushing the edge of hope, who are stepping into the unknown and taking risks, because that will then enable others to do the same.Collection: People
Women can succeed in villages all over the world today without relying on heavy machinery or debt. They can take leadership roles in agriculture, eliminating hunger and inequity.Collection: Agriculture
Science is showing us that we are even more connected to each other than we ever realized.Collection: Connected
What has dawned on me is that focusing on the "finite planet" frame sends a message that we have gone as far as Nature can take us and therefore we need to give power to forces outside Nature.Collection: Giving
We can't see ahead of time what actions are going to be the ones that move history in dramatic ways.Collection: Moving
I had the realization that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food, it is caused by the production system and an absence of democracy throughout the world.Collection: Democracy
How we frame the world - how we talk about it and define it - affects how we see things and how we live.Collection: World
Because we are living in a culture increasingly dominated by fear where many feel blocked.Collection: Culture
I also believe that it's almost impossible for people to change alone. We need to join with others who will push us in our thinking and challenge us to do things we didn't believe ourselves capable of.Collection: Believe
I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-woo l possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant.Collection: Mean
What we need to get right is not focusing on the fear associated with quantity - not enough, scarcity, and lack - and moving instead to a worldview that explores quality and connectedness.Collection: Moving
I like to think of power back in its Latin root, its meaning comes from posse - to be able.Collection: Latin
We evolved to be problem-solvers, to create, to be choosers of our own future!Collection: Problem
A life-long mission has been to counter the notion that political engagement is the spinach we must eat in order to have the dessert of freedom.Collection: Order
in a world where only a minor portion of the land is really well suited to agriculture, man is using much of the best land with dubious efficiency.Collection: Men
The notion that economic life is a distinct realm, governed by immutable laws of narrow self-interest, is giving way to a much older notion: economic life is only one strand in the rich web of human relationships.Collection: Self
We'll learn fear might not mean 'stop'; personally, I've come to believe fear usually means 'go.' It always means listen closely.Collection: Motivational
With an eco-mind, we get ready for surprises, for we realize it's just not possible to know what's possible.Collection: Faith
We can all reprogram our brain's responses by putting ourselves into new, initially uncomfortable situations. We'll learn fear might not mean 'stop'; I've come to believe fear usually means 'go.Collection: Fear
My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want.Collection: Power
There is no formula. We all must become spirited inventors. There's no single answer - not even a single starting point. Even the 'teachers' ... don't offer us the answer. They do offer us approaches, ways of thinking, possibilities we can adapt, and hope that might generate in us wholly new ideas.Collection: Teacher
Engagement is the good life. What could be more exciting than getting involved in something that you care about and joining with others and seeing something change? What could be more thrilling?Collection: Good Life
I think that luxury has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with beauty.Collection: Thinking
Little wonder that it can seem unthinkable to say "no, thanks" to the modern-day equivalent of our tribe - our fear-driven culture.Collection: Culture
What we see today is a world movement represented by the World Social Forum, involving all sorts of interactions across cultures, not to create some new "ism," but to learn as we walk and to create more democratic forms of social organization that re-embed economic life in community.Collection: Organization
My children threw me a life line: "Return to your roots - food - and rewrite your first book, Diet for a Small Planet." I learned that if I could just show up, in this case, if I could just get myself out of bed, get to the computer in my tiny office at MIT, and start writing, help would start arriving.Collection: Children
much agricultural land which might be growing food is being used instead to 'grow' money (in the form of coffee, tea, etc.).Collection: Coffee
What was so moving for [Diane Wilson], and also for me, is that she felt the Bay itself was like her grandmother. She said, "I don't think there's a woman alive who would give up fighting for her child, or her mother, or her grandmother."Collection: Mother
I believe it is possible that we can turn today's breakdown into a planetary breakthrough on one condition. We can do it if we can break free of a set of dominant but misleading ideas that are taking us down.Collection: Believe
Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain.Collection: Pain
No society has fulfilled its democratic promise if people go hungry... If some go without food they have surely been deprived of all power. The existence of hunger belies the existence of democracy.Collection: People
Diane Wilson asked, "Why aren't people upset? Why aren't people protesting?" The mayor and county commissioners told her to keep quiet, and everybody else was afraid to speak out against the companies, which included some of the country's biggest chemical companies. There were even attempts on her life. Family members abandoned her, and certainly none of the other shrimpers stood with her.Collection: Country
Recently, [Diana Wilson] went on a hunger strike to protest Dow Chemical's refusal to accept responsibility for a 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, caused by a company they now own, Union Carbide. In the past, Diane's hunger strikes had been lonely affairs, but this time friends and co-conspirators from around the country took turns joining her on her flatbed truck under the hot Texas sun, greeting Dow workers as they entered the plant.Collection: Country
For me, just showing up for the traveling and writing gave me the power to overcome my fear of fear.Collection: Writing
On the one hand, our social nature is our greatest beauty - it means that we have natural empathy and sympathy. But our social nature also means that we may let ourselves be controlled by the judgments of others, precisely because we care so much about our status in community.Collection: Mean
We can choose who we bring into our lives. We can choose who will reinforce our risk taking.Collection: Risk
What gave her [Diane Wilson] the courage? If you look at someone like Diane, it's easy to say, well I could never be like that. But we don't know. We do know that it's possible for a woman, who didn't grow up as a world changer, to find it in herself to take a stand.Collection: Growing Up
If we cannot know what's possible, then we are free to do that which is pulling our hearts and that which is life serving.Collection: Heart
History doesn't proceed in incremental little notches.Collection: Littles
We are very much social creatures who model ourselves on one another.Collection: Social
I never like to use those terms [like pessimistic].Collection: Use
Beauty exists irrespective of financial circumstances.Collection: Financial
Beauty is created by fellow human beings, and enhanced because they are in relationship with each other.Collection: Humans
Approaches to growing food that align with nature changed human relationships.Collection: Growing
Old models of farming with chemicals and credit mostly favored privileged men.Collection: Men
With organic approaches, women - who have been gardeners for millennia and mothers forever - can rise because of their intimate knowledge of nature.Collection: Mother
What we do in the book my daughter Anna and I wrote, Hope's Edge, is to give people a glimpse of food as a source of nourishment, health, and community, rather than a threat. That means reconnecting with food as it comes from the Earth and with those who produce food.Collection: Daughter
A teacher told me this story some time ago: She asked her students to line up in order of how much power they thought they had relative to the others in the class, and they all fought to be last in line. They didn't want to acknowledge that they had personal power.Collection: Teacher
The good life for me always meant connecting with those big, important issues that grown-ups get so excited about.Collection: Good Life