robin hood. they had metrics they went to agencies, very professional staff, take the measure of an agency on what mothers are for abused family members and they will come back and that is not going to work very well or if it is doing something really important. we need to go in and they pay for everything. all that is done. this is the most generous country in the world. there is no country in the world that gives money as freely as the united states does for a variety of causess and no city will ever compare with new york when it comes to raising money. i go to a lot of events with the waldorf and sometimes for causes no one knows about. it is now routine to raise $2 million. one of the things when we began to have somebody in our family

and my girls sometimes were even more generous than i wanted them to be about what to give away and when but i had grown up with no money and what i found part of the attractiveness of is it does give you freedom and you can help out worthy causes but robin hood is a model that -- just share one other one that i am particularly taken with now. and this has to do with education which i think a lot of how we reform education in america will depend on public/private partnership. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. up next, frances moore lappe argues people shouldn't be pessimistic about solving the ecological problems facing the planet. this is an hour and 10 minutes.

>> my name is tim farmham and i'm director of the worley center for the environment. i would like to welcome everyone to our second event in our environmental writers series and i will begin by acknowledging and from thinking are co-sponsors. the environmental studies department and especially the odyssey bookshop. our very own -- [applause] -- independently owned bookstore in south hadley. they do a fabulous job in any way and that includes bringing authors in to speak to the community. they make the valley a richer place. thank you so much. as i've mentioned this is our second event. our third will be on monday, november 7th and it will be captain charles more reading from and discuss his book plastic ocean:how they see captain's chance discovery launched the determined quest to

save the ocean. he is one of the first leg identify the huge ira plastic trash in the middle of the north pacific and he will tell us his story. on november 10th distinguished environmentalist gusts spec will present the annual miller worley environmental leadership lecture. he has a long and impressive resume including the founder of natural resources defense council, chief environmental advisor to jimmy carter and administrator of the development program. the stock is entitled american prospect:decline and rebirth and promises to be provocative and inspiring the special thank yous to environmental studies and her class which is here. our student volunteers, olivia dirk, paul blogging and be be laying and ruby maddox, our

tireless and amazing coordinator at the miller worley center for the environment. [applause] a huge thank you to our gracious donors, as the miller and richard wooley who makes event like this possible. frances moore lappe is the author of 18 books including the classic diet for a small planet. he is co-founder of three organizations including food first, institute for food and development policy and more recently the small planet institute. of collaborative network for research in popular education seeking to bring democracy to life which she leads with her daughter and at lappe. they co-founded a small planet fund which founds resources to democratic social movements worldwide. frances appears frequently have a public speaker and on radio and as a regular contributor to huffington post. her most recent work released by nation's books in september of

2011 is eco mind:changing the way we think to create the world we want. jane goodall called the book powerful and inspiring. eco mind will open your mind and change your sinking. i want everyone to read it. other recent books include getting a grip:clarity, creativity and courage in a world gone mad and getting a grip 2:courage for the really -- world we want. hope's edge written with anna lappe, democracy's edge and you have the power. choosing courage in a culture of fear. lappe's book have and translated into 15 languages less data using university courses at her influence is so great that it is impossible to measure. we are happy to have her here tonight. frances moore lappe. [applause]

>> thank you very much, odyssey bookstore. thank you especially the students i have had a pleasure of meeting via skype a few days ago. just really fired me up. thank you for being here tonight. i would like to begin my talk tonight with the words of the hawk in his book the seniority cage. it is too late and things are too bad for pessimism. that is the spirit of pico mind and the spirit i try to maintain when i get up in the morning. i would like to begin with the journey that brought me here on this treacherous drive from boston. actually began 40 years ago. it began when i sat down at the berkeley agricultural library at

the 20 something. with this intuition that oh, food is so basic. everybody has to eat and if people aren't eating, what is more important than that? if i could just understand why there is hunger in the world that would begin to unlock the mysteries of economics and politics. so the population bomb that exploded that experts were telling us we had run out of food and i wanted to know is that true? so i sat there almost literally putting 2 and 2 together and very soon in the process i learned no, there's more than enough food for all of us. is true that and it is true today. worse, i learned we are actively creating the scarcities that we say we fear. my question grew.

why hunter? why would an species do that? it grew and grew over the decade to the question that motivates my life and this new book, it is the question why are we together creating a world that we as individuals would never choose? because i know and you know no one who gets in the world turns off the alarm and says yes, i want another child to die today of hunger or says my goal is to make sure the planet gets hotter and species are lost forever. i don't think that is going on. that seems like a pretty big question. why are we together creating a world that not only would we not shoes but actually violates our common sense and our deepest sensibilities as human beings? that is the question. over the decades i have a lot of help from a lot of great thinkers and it began to dawn on

me. one particular thinker, eric herodian enemy of human destructiveness. that is when it began to click that if we think about how we got into the place we are, we have to look at what is unique about the human species and one of these things is how we think. how we see. the quality of the cumin mind, we see the world according to a mental map that we absorbed in each culture. each culture developed a way of seeing life and we can see outside our mental map. it acts like a filter. it is the airline's work. to make my case i will take you to my kitchen last thanksgiving. i got really charged up to make my favorite root vegetable dish that morning. i knew 43 people would be in my living room in the afternoon so i better get busy. i started looking for my favorite dutch oven to cook my

root vegetables and looked in the coverage where i was sure it was and it wasn't there. i went to the basement and came back up that looked at the upper shelves and couldn't find it and got so frustrated and wondered who i had lent it to and forgotten or something and finally gave up. an hour later i turned around and there it was. except i had put a plant in it. so hopefully you kind of get what i am getting at. i was looking for a kitchen item and it is not inconspicuous. it is red. i couldn't see it because i had converted it to a platter simply by putting a plant in it. i had put it into another frame. i couldn't see it from the kitchen frame. so this is our challenge. and this aspect of our mentality, the way we see through the filters, the

dominant way we see is the mental map we absorb is like serving. my thesis with you tonight is the map we absorber consciously in our culture is fundamentally like denying it. that explains a lot about why we are in the mess we are in. and the challenge that is very clear. is it possible for us to begin to surface or acknowledge the dominant map it is taking us down and begin to shape a more life serving mental map, one that is aligned with all we know about science, nature and human nature. what is this a dominant map? i think that it certainly carries the assumption that you and i are all separate from one another or separate from nature or distinct entities often in competitive struggles and the

very root of that competitive struggle is the premise of black. not enough of anything. i call it the premise of lack of goods and lack of goodness. there's not enough energy or food or parking places in boston. not enough anything. and there's not enough goodness in us. this is the premise. you peel away the head, what we like to think and get to what we really count on, you believe we have come to assume that is self-interest. it is competition and it is materialism. that is what we can count on. what i would like to do is if you can imagine a spiral in the sky. in the center is motivating force that sets us in motion. from the premise of lack, the

lack of good this, then we selfish little shoppers are in competition over scarcity. from that premise we can't think we are capable of coming together in common problem-solving to figure out what works for the hole. we are not capable of that if we are selfish little shoppers so what do we do? we believe the leader four main notion we have to turn over our fate and social outcomes to something that works on its own with how best that is an infallible if not magical force. ronald reagan actually used the term magic to refer to it. the magic of the market. messed up little human beings, we don't get involved. we let it do its magic. unfortunately while markets have served humanity for eons the girl we have hit upon this

peculiar idea of, for our particular market that it can result in b 9 outcomes for all of us if driven by one rule. highest return to existing wealth. people already own the shares of the company and run them. from that premise highest return to existing wealth what happens then is that wealth accrues to wealth accrues to wealth until we reach the point that i checked out today with politicsfact and how it worked out mathematically. recently for 400 americans, control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the american population. in 2005 citigroup researchers called a platonic because for the top 1% controlling as much as the bottom 90%. that is where the occupation wall street 1% language comes in. what happens then?

we start with the premise of black and turn our fate to this in fallible force, this peculiar notion of a market driven by this narrow rule which then ends up concentrating well to the extent that we end up creating what? let's just take food for example. there is more than 20 to 30% depending on what year you are looking at from the 1960s when i was writing guide for a small planet. today there is more than 20% more food for each of us that there was back then. ..

>> we end up with ten corporations who control about -- this was at of 2000 -- ten corporations control half of the food and beverage products at our supermarkets. and, of course, not because they're bad people, but because of the logic that i'm describing, the return to wealth has been from highly processed foods, foods that trigger the pleasure centers so that we've become virtually addicted to them, and so it -- where are we? we are at the point where 40% of the calories that our children are eating today are nutritionally empty. so that's another kind of scarcity, right? a scarcity of healthy, nutritious food that we don't even identify as a lack up, --

often, but there it is. so what i'm suggesting is from the premise of scarcity we end up actually creating the appearance of scarcity. and then what happens? see, see, see, i told you so. we really are these selfish little competitors. that's who we really are. and we see just a few at the top with their riches and people struggling now just to make ends meet, and isn't that proof that human beings are just selfish and competitive? and what happens then is that we just trust ourselves even more. if you look at the polls now, the distrust of one's neighbor, the trust in each other is declining as well as the trust in government. radical drops. so we end up then creating this scarcity that we say we fear that then becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. now, the good news is that a lot of people are awakening and realizing, wait a minute, this

isn't, this isn't working. this isn't the world i want to live in. this makes no sense. the ecological destruction built into this is devastating. the human misery is devastating. and partly as a result of that, part hi as a result of -- partly as a result of breakthroughs in anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, archaeology, partly as a result -- very much partly a result of breakthroughs in ecological sciences, another way of seeing is emerging, another way of seeing life, ourselves in it is emerging. it is taking shape. and so i just wallet to take you -- want to take you around that spiral for a minute. it's a very different one. instead of the scarcity mind which is the dominant mind that i was describing, this premise of lack, i see merging what i've now come to call the ecomind, instead of the world as simply these distinct entities that are all competing for not you haveness -- enoughness, what i

sense in an ecological world view is a much more science-based understanding, that, in fact, we are all connected moment to moment. that is the nature of life. we are all connect inside a process of continuous change, not a static reality that we're competing over, but a continuous shaping of all the entities of every system moment to moment. so many great teachers have influenced me, but i love in particular the physiologist at oxford university in england who wrote the music of life, a beautiful little book. in which he says so well what i'm trying to say. he says in biological systems there are no privileged components telling the rest what to do. rather, there is a system in which every element is shaping through its interactions with all other elements, they're being shaped moment to moment by each other. in this world view as my friend

has said, frankie, in this way of seeing there are no parts, there are only participants. and so rather than these entities alone fighting over not enoughness, we see ourself moment to moment, co-creating reality through our active choices and even our passiveness is actually shaping the world around us. so in the ecological world view, in the ecomind the only choice we don't have is whether to change the world. because we are moment to moment co-creating reality around us. so i would just ask us then to look at the implications. so let me start this spiral in the sky again from this premise that, in fact, rather than a lack, this interconnectedness of life and this continuous movement of life where co-creation is the dominant idea here that from scarcity we start

with the premise instead of possibility. we start with the premise of possibility. so what does the ecomind tell us then about human nature? remember the scarcity mind. it was just where these selfish little critters, these materialists. the ecomind says, yes, sure, that's really showing up. we see the incredible cruelty we can be toward one another. that's showing up a lot. but from an ecomind we also know we can look at the broad sweep of history, we look at the complexity and see that, in fact, the truth is that, yes, given certain conditions most of us -- not a few of us, but most of us -- will behave with incredible brutality. we think about the holocaust. what was the holocaust about? it wasn't a crazed dictator who was just alone doing this. it wasn't a few sadistic guards

doing this, it was also some very ordinary people. if you, if you read the book "ordinary men" about battalion 101 from hamburg, germany, you realize that here they were. you know, they didn't think of themselves as environment people at all -- environment people at all, but they were sent out to kill jews point blank. at first, most of them existed, until at the end more than 90% had committed murder, 38 million -- excuse me, 38,000 jews murdered and many sent to death camps. ordinary people. we think of the stanford prison experiment, and we know there that in 1971 just when i was down the road writing "diet for a small planet," there was an experiment in which young people who tested normal were put into a mock prison setting that was supposed to last for two weeks, this experiment.

the professor had to stop it in six days because the students were so brutalizing one another that there was an emotional breakdown happening. and it looked eerily similar to abu ghraib. so we know under certain conditions that we can be very, very cruel to one another. and from an ecomind, though, we realize that the evidence is equally clear that under certain conditions we can behave with incredible benevolence. in fact, now with the, um, social mris looking at our brains when we're doing certain activities, it's fascinating what they're learning about us. for example, when people are competing versus when people are cooperating, they found that when we cooperate, there are parts of our brains that are stimulated as if we're eating chocolate. that's how delicious it is to cooperate. we also have tremendous evidence that fairness, basic fairness, if any of you have had little toddlers or been around them

much, you know that it's not fair is a refrain, you know? we instinctively know that if things break down, if unfairness enters into a community, then the community starts to fall apart. and we involved in tightly knit tribes knowing that it depended upon the preservation of community. so we didn't want to break that apart with unfairness. so this deep need for fairness as well as, also i'm going to return to this in a moment, because we now know because of neuroscience that there are neurons in our brain so that when i'm going like this, there are actually neurons in your brain firing as if you were doing that. that's how connected we are. that's the foundation of empathy. so we have all that to work with as well as our terrific need to make a department in the world, um, as my mentor, eric frahm put

it, he said we should ditch the whole idea of i think, therefore, i am, and actually the deeper definition of self should be because -- that i am because i effect. yes, on the one hand we have the capacity for unspeakable evil, and we have just the qualities we need to make a turn toward life on our planet from our villages and commitments all the way up to the global level. i'm convinced that we have both. now, from the ecological perspective, though, we realize, oh, we humans are just like any other species in the environment. it depends on the context, what is the context, what is being brought forth from us. what are the conditions? maybe a certain plant needs that much water and that much sunshine. what do humans need? and here i'm really going out on a limb, but i'm suggesting that i have a clue of what are the conditions that bring out the worst and bring out the best. and i hope that i stimulate a lot of debate. but i think that history shows

us and these lab experiments i just mentioned that there are three conditions, pretty sure to bring out the worst. they are concentrated power. they are secrecy. we do not do well when we know nobody's watching. as we saw on wall street recently when the traders on wall street who were creating those risky derivatives and pushing them off as good investments. you know one of the slogans i learned was ibg, ybg. i'll be gone, you'll be gone. we can get away with this because nobody's watching. we can get our millions and get out of here. and most of them have. so secrecy is not a good thing for showing up the better parts of ourselves. and finally, cultures of blame. cultures, the idea that somehow it's very nonecological, right? that somebody is just a victim, and somebody else is the perpetrator because from an ecological world view if we're really co-creators, if we're all

connected, we're all complicit in whatever is happening. so a culture of blame makes no sense whatsoever. so you hear the tea partiers blaming obama, and you hear the liberals blaming the republicans. actually, from an ecological point of view, we are all responsible. and, therefore, we're all part of the solution or not. so the conditions that bring out the worst in us are pretty clear, and if we figure that out, if we have some clue, then that, to me, is liberation. because we have some direction on what to do. we can start actually creating the conditions that bring out the best in us. and we have something real to stand on. and it is grounded in a great deal of reflection on what we can now learn about our species. so that is why i -- oh, and this, by the way, i was doing the spiral in the sky because as we then begin to recognize that we can be both, and we begin to

think what are the conditions that can bring out the best in us and we start to create those, then we realize that we can have, we can come together in real deliberation, we can come together in problem solving, we can create a government that is responsible to us because we know how to remove the power of private wealth from our political system which was infecting the negative cycle terribly. we learn that we can do that because we begin to trust ourselves, and we begin to build on that trust as we create. i'll give you some examples of this in just a moment. but that trust grows. we start out with the idea that we have the potential in us under the right conditions. we start to create those which i would argue one central piece of that is removing the power of wealth from political decision making. then we realize, yes, we can have a market that remains open and fair because we step up and set the values boundaries in which the market works. and we recognize, oh, yeah, the

market left to its own devices ends up in monopoly which kills the market. so, actually, it is the citizens who are required to create a fair and competitive market. and so we begin -- i sort of like to think that we could reframe the idea of free market as our freedom to participate in it meaning that we all have the wherewithal to actually keep it open and to participate. so to meet our needs. and so from there then what happens is that our needs, we begin to create rules in which the market operates, so power's dispersed, and people have access to income. not all centered, not all collected at the top. and then our coffin spills, and we begin to build trust, and that then becomes a virtuous cycle, increasing in intensity. so that is what i'm suggesting is possible as we go that deep to actually surface what are are

assumptions that have been taking us down and how digging out those and beginning to frame them based on a more science, more evidence-based view can give us what i call not optimism or pessimism, but rather i call myself a possiblist because i think from that point of view it is possible that we can do this ultimate, ultimate challenge, this exhilarating time to be alive where we can begin to align ourselves with what we know. and so my work now, and this book, "e no mind," is very much about what happens as we make this shift towards an ecological world view in which we are all co-creators trying to manifest these continuous dispersions of power, transparency and mutuality that is inherent in a viable ecosystem of humanity, in my view. um, so what does that look like?

let me just give you a taste of what it means to shift from this scarcity mind to ecomind. from the scarcity mind, and i think that even, you know, many people i admire so much within the environmental movement, many of my heros that off put out if -- often put out if not literally promote a frame that the problem is from the scarcity mind that we've hit the limits of a finite planet. and that is what is taking us down. and certainly, as we are about to reach seven billion people, i don't know if you've been listening to the radio recently or reading the papers, that feeling is coming through, oh, my god, seven billion. we've hit the limits. and let me just suggest what is my sense of the problem with that frame from -- because it is trapped in the scarcity mind and what is another frame that is empowering and is arising. my sense is that that limits

frame, one, it increases fear in people, and we know that from social psychology that fear itself makes people more self-centered and more materialistic. but it also suggests somehow that while, one, it suggests that if we just cut back, hit the limits, then the real issue is just quantitative, right? we cut back. and we just heard a few moments ago about the plastic soup in the pacific ocean. i've read that it's the size of two states of texas. so, okay, we could cut that in half. would plastic soup, would plastic debris and smothering of aquatic life, would that work if it were just one state of texas instead of two states of texas? i don't think we'd think so. so the limits frame keeps me in that quantitative, oh, we just have to cut back, cut back. but rather, what we know from an ecomind, it is about changing

the system it that generates that waste. the word "waste" then reminds me of another problem with the scarcity frame and the limits being the problem. we think of the problem out there, and we don't look at the fact. we say, oh, we've hit the limits like food. oh, we've hit the limits to feed people. you hear that quite often. still, as i heard it 40 years ago. and yet we don't see the enormous waste built into our global food system. where you less than half of -- where now less than half of the grain that we produce in our world goes directly to human beings. about a third of it goes to animals which we know, you know,. >> rink its potential to feed us, and a third of our fish catch is now going to ab malls. -- animals. so, yes. so that we are just taking this vast abundance and actively reducing it, and that's before you mentioned the fact that 30-40% of the food is literally

wasted in terms of it's, you know, a lot of it because of the concentration of wealth, there's such poverty in the world that people can't store the food that they grow effectively. or you take energy from a we've hit the limits frame, wait a minute, wait a minute, how can we say we've hit the limits if scientists tell us anywhere from 55-80% of energy produced in this country is wasted? so the limits frame doesn't call us then to explore, to get curious about what is it about this system of concentration, of decision making that ends up generating more waste than goods, more waste than what we really want in both of these areas, certainly, and more? and so the other problem i see with the limits frame coming out of the scarcity mind is that when i hear that idea, oh, we've

hit the limits of what nature can provide, i can certainly understand why people say, oh, we can do better than nature, we've got to go for geoengineering because we've hit the limits of what nature can do. i can understand how you would jump to that conclusion if you just heard and believed that we've hid the limits -- hit the limits of nature. but rather, we've created a system of active destruction. that's what we've got to be zeroing in on. so from the we've hit limits frame, what is the alternative? from the ecomind all of my thinking could be summarized from this shift from we've hit the limits, we have to cut back to we can align with the laws of nature, including human nature as i've pointed out, including what we know about human nature, creating the rules that bring out the best in us. and be there's more than enough for all. and so we can reduce that sense

of fear and panic, we can start to learn more and more about nature's laws and more and more and more as we explore, as we develop the courage to create new rules to bring out the best in us. we can then see we're alining our society with human nature. and, unfortunately, unfortunately, the rules that we've currently built from the scarcity mind actually manifest exactly the conditions bringing out the worst in us; concentrated power, secrecy and blame game. so what does it look like then to begin to align, move from limits to alignment? i want to focus for a moment on food and farming because this is what makes my heart go pitter patter right now. because what happens from an alignment frame is you start to privilege, you start to see those people who you thought were just a burden on the planet who, you know, were just going to be taking our resources away, and you start to see as our

heros, as our climate and our food heros. now, here's what i mean. if you look at the entire food system from ground to, um, supermarket, the estimate is that some, that it is now contributing somewhere between 44% and 57% of greenhouse gases. because of its intensive use of nitrogen fertilizer, for example, and transportation and, um, processing, etc., etc. and concentrated feed lot production. so that's not good -- that's bad news. but think of the possibility. the estimate is that if the world moved toward agroecology including agroforest try on a global basis and relocallized our food system, that that in itself over just a couple

decades could cut greenhouse gases in the half. it is stunning, the possibility. and 70% of the people producing food in the world today are small farmers. so we start to see small farmers able to move toward ecological approaches, using the latest that we know about how to, how to grow food, how to grow diversified crops, how to work with insects in ways that actually control harmful pests, how to work the soil to enhance organic matter, etc., etc. we know then that they are a key, key to the solution. i want to take you to one of the poorest countries in the world, niger. think of it just below the strip of north african countries, there it is in the middle just beneath that north african section. and that country had been seen

last year, certainly, as just nothing but a famine nightmare. and yet unbeknownst to most of us over the last 20 years in niger farmers have regrained by nurturing trees that before they saw as a threat to production, they started seeing that, actually, by nurturing the trees and keeping them growing in the fields that they were growing food, that it increased the fertility of their fields, it held the soil in place and actually helped to create pathways to hold the water and nutrients in the soil, increased that as well as provided fodder and fruit and, um, firewood. and over less than 20 years, 200 million new trees flourishing on 12 and a half million acres of land and providing food security for two and a half million peoplement now, the researcher

from whom i've learned this, and he sent me these wonderful pictures of these integrated trees and farming. i said chris, this is chris rege in a university in the netherlands, i said, why didn't i know about this? why isn't anybody looking at this? and he said, nobody thought to look. again, the mental map. they saw this country, a desperately poor country as losers or. nobody was looking through the satellite and saying, oh, there's a whole region there that's getting greener. what's going on? and i was so moved by listening to him quote the chief there in one of the villages in niger saying we stopped the desert, and everything changed. and the people started coming back to the villages. women were more empowered because they were learning a lot of these ecological approaches that did not depend on getting credit to buy special seeds or to buy fertilizer because the women were often excluded from

credits, so women were more empowered, schools were more able to flourish because people could pay the school fees and for their children to go to school. so that is just one example of what can happen when we move from this frame of limits to alignment. it's an example that means a great deal to me. but another example is from india. again, we often hear only about deforestation in the world. and yet as we align our social rules with nature's rules, what can happen? well, in india devolution of authority into ten million households engaged in community forestry. and what that means is they had the respondent -- responsibility in their villages, these forest management groups, there are about 100,000 of them now in india where the villagers

themselves are responsible for insuring that the forest is not overuse inside a way that caused ongoing harm and degradation of the forest. and it is working. so much so that india's one of the few countries in the world now in which there is an expansion of the health and the acreage of forest coffer. so this is the kind of thing that happens when we align our social rules with, um, what we know about the natural world. i see it, also, in brazil very much so that there what happened? i'll take you back to the hunger question. there many -- brazil has been seen as one of the most hungry countries in the world even though it's wealthy because, again, if concentration. what happened when they declared food a human right. and elected in particular in one city that my daughter and i

visited, elected city government that ran on food is a human right and began to create social rules by bringing all of the different stakeholders together, create new rules -- not getting rid of the market, but keeping the market accountable and inclusive of the hungriest people so that, for example, they said, okay, you, small farmer, you can come in and sell your food at a local food stand on city-owned land, a little plot of city-owned land that we'll give you for virtually nothing to use if you keep your food within the reach of the forest people. and these councils then brought together all the diverse members of the community. this is a very large city. and the city invested one penny a day, it turned out when i calculated what this worked out to be over these years in terms of each citizen in this large city. it was about a penny a day they invested in these multifaceted programs to make healthy food

available. and do you know that in one decade they cut the death rate of babies and children by over 50% in one decade? on one penny per day, per person of their city? so it's another example of aligning the rules, the social rules with what we know brings out the best in us. and so instead of moving, instead of having this great abundance and yet scarcity, experience of scarcity, they began to make healthy food available. and now a new rule in brazil is that 30% of the food in schools throughout the country has to be supplied locally from small farmers. this is the kinds of changes in rules. so i'd like to end my talk tonight and, hopefully, we'll have time for discussion. i'd like to end with a very personal message about sort of what i think is most needed for us, the individual. because i guess you know by now

that i think human beings are good enough. i think we have in us the qualities we need. i didn't want get to draw out all -- i didn't get to draw out all my evidence, but i think there is plenty of evidence that we've evolved into tightly-knit social groups in which we are finally attuned to being connected with one another. but i do think we need to work on one core quality, and that core quality is what i like to call bold humility. by that i mean that the boldness is this. our social nature is this double-edged sword for our species. in other words, we involved in these tightly-knit tribes knowing our preservation meant staying in group. well, that's great if group is on track. but what happens if larger tribe that we are part of is really like heading right over victoria

falls metaphorically? but, okay, what happens? what happens? it means that separating from the pack is life, not death. but it still brings up that primal fear of separation from others if we start to voice a different point of view. so this is our, this is the trick for our species, how -- and maybe the most important of all. you think maybe, maybe we're the only species for whom fear, our fear response is actually a hazard to our survival. think about it. because if we let that fear of separation keep us with the pack and the pack is going down the tubes, that's not good. so how do we rethink fear? how do we rethink fear, maybe at this moment in the 21st century just we have to think of it as an idea just like the ideas of scarcity. and the ideas of possibility. what i mean is, we can take that

energy of fear and use it, not be used by it. and so i have a very cheesy gimmick that i use, and i will share it with you. and that is that when i'm afraid -- can you hear that? it's very loud inside me anyway. it's a pounding heart. and so for a long time i would get that for most of my life, and i would think, oh, you wimp. what's wrong with you, you know? why are you so nervous? what's a bad thing that could happen to you? gradually i said, okay, i'm going to rename this. i talk about reframings. i'm going to reframe this. i'm going to call it inner applause. [laughter] [applause] and it works most of the time. and so my thought is then that, um, if we can, if we can realize those fear sensations may mean

we're exactly in the right place at the right time doing just what we should do. but then how do we get more courage on a daily basis? and there our social nature really can serve us well and our smarts. we say, okay, if it's really true this neuron stuff, if we really are mimicking ourself inside of our brain patterns actually mimicking what we're watching, then we know how to get more courage. we hang out with it. we choose our friends who are a little more risk takers than we are in a positive way. and we hang out with them, and we watch them. and we try to be more that way. um, and it works. i'm convinced that it works. it's worked my entire life. and so, and now i have my children. they're risk takers. and so i love to try to model myself on them. so i think that that is very real. and also, just very practically on a daily basis, we can now

because of the internet, we can bring stories of our heros into our lives on a daily basis. we can choose what i call a courage news diet. we can bring -- yes magazine, solutions journal, the e-letters, i mentioned many in the back of the book that will bring into your inbox stories of possibility. and so here's, here it is. the choice is up to us. and as i realize as i'm getting to the end of my talk i said, oops, i realized a few moments ago that i'd forgotten -- and maybe this is part of my own fear problem -- that i'd forgotten to mention what i see as a linchpin in this turn toward life and this idea of democracy that really is accountable to us, what i call living democracy. i'd forgotten to mention the linchpin. i talked about money and politics a bit, i talked -- but i didn't really try to convince you that it's really possible by

giving you my superhero example. so here it is. one of my heros whose picture i have, um, in my heart and i've used many times is a woman who 11 years ago was a single mom and a waitress in auburn, maine. and she had a high school education, but her friends saw a lot of leadership in deborah simpson. and they said, deborah, why don't you run for the state legislature. and she said, what are you talking about? i don't have money, i don't have a name. and they said, deb, you're not paying attention. in maine, we have voluntary public financing. 80% of the legislators in maine have run without any corporate money. all you have to do, deb, is get $5 from 50 people, and you can run for office. oh, i'm a waitress, she said. i can do that. [laughter] she got $5 from 50 people. she won. she's been reelected four times. she has now become such a

stellar representative and now a senator in the state of maine that she sat as co-chair of the judiciary committee for the state of maine. her work and her colleagues in the state that have removed the power of corporations largely was able to pass one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation, a producer responsibility law that then has gone viral in other states and kept a pound of lead out of that beautiful state for every single citizen in the state. so i took a tiny detour there to talk about deb for a minute because now at the national level we have legislation that is somewhat modeled on the maine example, that if we step up out of our distrust of one another and distrust of government and begin to believe that we can have a government accountable to us if we can get money out of the picture, we can then insist that our legislators support, it's called fair elections now.

it has 75 co-sponsors now in the house. we have to believe and do this, get money out of the system. so, um, that is the bold part, is this way of rethinking fear, of stepping up, of knowing that we've got to go to the root of the problem and being willing to do it no matter how much it takes, that exhilarating sense that we're going to the root. and what is the humility part in my bold humility formation? okay. the humility part gets a lot easier when you're old like me. what i mean by that is some years ago i realized after my daughter and i traveled the world together to write "hope's edge," i came home and said, anna, do you realize, almost everything we wrote about in this book i would have given no chance of success when i was your age? she was 26 then. i would have given it no chance of success. that is really humbling. but think how liberating it is.

if i would have given those initiatives virtually no chance of success, then how can i today say that something is not possible? and so what i realized that i needed to do to keep, to keep that energy in me was to make a checklist, make a checklist in my head of all the things that most get me up in the morning, that most inspire the heck out of me that i would have, ah, that's not going to happen, you know? for example, for example, i grew up in texas, and, um, in texas in 19990 the utility companies pulled together a citizens' jury of ordinary people to weigh in on energy options. and they shifted their views and came to a conclusion. they wanted to move towards renewables, this citizens' jury, this segment of the population, a randomly-selected group. they said that to the utility companies, and they then began to invest in wind energy.

and i just learned that that is one of the reasons that texas has now become a wind energy leader which has helped push the u.s. into wind energy leadership in the world. and if i had, if somebody had told me, you know, even 15 years ago, ten years ago that that would be possible, i would say, nah, that could never happen. texas? oil, not wind. what are you talking about? no way. um, but i also think of another hero of mine and maybe my hero that has done more for my backbone than anyone i've ever met. that is the nobel peace prize winner who passed away a few weeks ago. but in 1977 on earth day when guy planted seven trees for seven environmental women leaders, now, if i had known him then and heard about that, i would have said, oh, how nice. isn't that nice? she planted seven trees.

i would never have believed that 20 years later that would grow into 30 million trees and then 45 million trees. and then when she would inspire the united nations' environmental program to establish the plant for the planet program, have any of you ever heard of that? well, not many have. of some here have. plant for the planet program, there i go again. 2007 i heard about it, and i thought, oh, they're going to set the goal of a billion trees a year, you know, that's lovely, but could that really happen? i looked back last year, 11 billion trees. so when her seven trees in 1977 on earth day have moved to help directly inspire 11 billion trees. actually, the country that planted the most you may never guess is ethiopia. and the president congratulated the boy scouts for their great work on that campaign. [laughter]

so, um, what is the lesson here? the lesson that i would like to leave you with is the core lesson of an ecomind. if we really see the world in continuous change and continuous co-creation in which we are all participants, not parts, but participants in which the only choice we don't have, as i said, is whether to change the world, then we have something that is, i believe, our ultimate freedom. we realize that it is not possible to know what's possible. and that is our freedom to go for the world we want. thank you so very much. thank you. [applause] thank you.

>> we have time for some questions, and i'd like if you do have a question, please, go to the mic. i know you're tempted to speak from your seat, but we'd like you to go to the microphone to ask your questions. whoever would like to go. [background sounds] >> it's on? okay. my name's missy. hi. >> hi. >> i was -- >> oh, wonderful. >> i'd seen you earlier, and we were talking a lot about occupy wall street, and i appreciated, i guess, your son's article called "don't think of a pig," which is the framing of the occupy movement so it becomes more about it's general assembly, more about showing people what democracy looks

like. and i was just curious, in light of what has happened in the past two days in the oakland with the protesters being attacked with rubber bullets, tear gas and then the oakland pd actively denying what happens, it seemed like there's been a lot of anger. so i was wondering, like, what could possibly be a hopeful response for that sort of brutal brutality? even if you current there, just watching this veteran being hit in the head with a tear gas canister, he's still unconscious. what is a positive response that isn't an angry? because there's so much anger among all of these people who are just watching. so some advice? i don't know. >> well, i think to contribute our energy to participate directly, that is the best response. to turn out, to support in any and every way, to help contribute to the discussion so that, as you note, that piece --

actually, my son and i wrote it together. [laughter] but that piece that anthony and i wrote together was, um, trying to contribute to the reframe of rather than the blame game that the reframe toward let's go to the root and remove the power of money from politics rather than just blame the greedy corporation. because we are also participants in allowing that kind of concentration to cake place. so i think -- to take place. so i think the only response that is -- well, even before this turn of events which is so ugly and so painful that, um, that i think the most constructive thing that we can do is to participate, to show the support and to contribute to the dialogue that turns this from protest to actual, a

compelling vision of how we can come together on really profound changes. and so i think, um, so far i feel, yes, there's a lot of anger motivating this, but there's also been a lot of goodwill toward people as well. when i was at occupation wall street with anthony, the speaker there was very much articulating that we want -- we, the 99 -- want to be contributors. we want to, um, help. we want to be called on and to be useful, and that was the message that i was hearing more than it was just pointing fingers at the other. so i think, um, that any and every way we can work to see that this is not just something, oh, we'll look at a year from now and say, isn't that nice? i don't know if any of you want to go to washington on saturday.

there's going to be action starting at 11:30. i'm going to be speaking at 5:30. if anybody's going, i'd love it if you would come up and keep me company and to help me figure out what to say in my ten minutes. it's, they're going to have people speaking at the mic starting from 7:30, hopefully, all through the rest of the night on saturday. this is organized by the coffee party. and by -- [laughter] occupy wall street. coffee party is wonderful. it is not -- the name kind of betraying its real purpose which is to create an arena in which people of all persuasions can actually talk, and you have to sign a civility pledge to participate in the coffee party. and i just think the world of the founder, annabelle park, just a very low-key woman who just said, you know, there's got to be another way that's not screaming at one another. so i really, you should look. coffeepartyusa is the web site,

and i really welcome people because i'm sure especially after what is happening in oakland there'll be even more people there, and there's temptation just to focus on the anger, the outrage and to -- how do we use this? because so many people are saying this is just the moment we need, right? and i had written ows throughout these notes, and yet i got into my, into my ecomind thing with my special examples and forgot to draw it in. but i do feel that it is an expression or it can be an expression of everything that i'm talking about. especially as we add in this message that we're all accountable, we all have to be part of the solution, not just pointing fingers. but thank you for that question. i wish i had a more easy answer. but thank you. hope there are other questions. >> hi. >> hi. >> um, i didn't want get a chance to read your book, but i

was wondering if you could share a little more about your vision and how we can start to spread this mindset of the ecomind and start to change people's minds without not necessarily getting backlash, but having issues where people say, oh, that's not going to happen or just kept sit. >> skepticism. >> i guess i'm wondering what your idea is and where you'd like to see us in a decade or so. >> right. well, you may have guessed that i think the best way to counter the skepticism which i see a reflection of just, you know, not wanting to get one's hopes up and get crushed again, you know? by defeat, by feeling that it's hopeless. that the way that human beings learn is through story. and by exposing ourselves and others to examples, to real-life examples, this is what changed my life so profoundly when anna and i traveled around the world

and to this day, um, you know, i'm just, just look, you know, i'm looking, looking, looking for examples of living democracy. i call it emerging. and there are so many. i mean, i could have gone on for hours and hours more. i just mentioned a few. so i think finding and being a storyteller, and you are an educator. everyone in this room is an educator. and just when you hear those words of despair or words of just, oh, no, nothing can change, just reminding people that change has happened so radically. i did a radio interview with iowa public radio this morning, and one of the callers said, you know, what are you talking about, you know, where have you ever seen a country that had any kind of real dispersion of wealth in it? and i had to remind him that from my birth decade until my children's birth decade, might be was the '40s, theirs was the '70s, that the lowest 20% of the population doubled their real purchasing power, that we

were becoming a much more fair society. and so this rapid consolidation of wealth is very recent. and i think for people your age and many of the students here, you know, it's really harder for you to know that really in your bones like i do because i grew up with that, with that sense of possibility as in the '60s we cut the poverty rate in half between 1960 and the early 1970s. we cut the poverty rate in half in this country. we look at a country like brazil, as i mentioned. they have cut their poverty rate by 20-40% depending on what measure you take. that's incredible. austria has 18.5% of its agricultural land is organic today. ours is less than 1%. this is happening. so i think the more that we can begin to directly get, you know, get tastes of what outside of our own culture, and i'm sure

many of you are doing that by traveling elsewhere, but also just become, practice the story telling and sharing those stories, i think that is key. and just what you exude, you know, what do can you exude as a human being, a sense of possibility, not a blind hopefulness, but a sense of, you know, this is what human beings are about. that it comes naturally to us to want to be problem softers. so -- problem solvers. so come join me in this rather than, oh, you should. i really think that's key. >> thank you. >> thank you so much for the question. great, thank you. >> hi. thank you so much for sharing with us. um, i really like the title of your book, "ecomind," in that it's supposed to be coming from the philosophy of ecology.

um, one point that i wanted to ask about looking at the world as an ecosystem is that all loops are closed, and something you mentioned before in talking about your cycle is that there's a myth of accumulation and more and more and more. and a central aspect of what our economic system is based on is this idea of perpetual growth. and if we can continue to grow our economy, that that is what's going to trickle down to everybody and make everyone happy and have access to all of their needs and their wants. um, so given that you're pushing people to look at the world through the eyes of what an ecosystem is, do you talk about whether or not this, frankly, myth of perpetual growth is possible? because when you look at an ecosystem, there is not perpetual growth, there is cyclical growth. and i know you said that you

don't like writers or activists that talk about reaching the limits of what our environment can provide. and yet if you're looking through an ecological mindset, i think that there is some truth to cyclical as opposed to perpetual growth. and if you have anything to say to that and how it applies to how our economies should function or, um, how we should view the solutions to meeting everybody's needs. >> great question. >> thank you. >> great question. did you all hear? um, yeah, that's very complex question, and i'll try to summarize the answer this way. in its very first little trap in my book is that no growth is the answer, and i try to reframe out of this growth/no growth altogether because the problem with saying that growth is the problem is that it kind of blesses what we're doing now with a lovely term. i mean, i want my granddaughters

to grow, and i want my plants to grow. so growth is a positive thing for most people. so if you say what we're currently doing is growth, when i argue that most of what we're doing to today is waste and destruction in the sense of growth of the qualities that most of us think is good about growth. so i'd like to drop that terminal together and call what we're doing now the economy of waste and destruction and to talk about what we want is an economy that is thriving because it is aligned with exactly the cycles of nature that you are talking about. and so one of the things about the ecomind perspective, it's not just about cutting back on greenhouse gases, right? it's about righting the cycle, the carbon cycle, so that we are not, um, emitting more than we are absorbing. and so that we are in that way aligned. but that doesn't mean that we can't have thriving economies where many more of us -- not few of us -- are having our needs

met. so i think that is really what you touched on there, the cycles of nature and recognizing as was made so beautifully known in the first book that was popular in this regard, "cradle to cradle," that came out about ten years ago to talk about the whole system as one process feeds another, the whole concept of waste can be eliminated. and so, for example, i was in omega institute in new york, um, where they explained to us that, um, over a 36-hour cycle in that institute where many hundreds of people stay at any given time, that 25,000 gallons of water used for all purposes from toilets to kitchen to every other use, that over a 36-hour period through putting that water through microorganisms and beautiful plant that is we got to walk through, this greenhouse with these gorgeous plants, that

within that time that it goes from, quote-unquote, wastewater into water so pure it returns healthfully to the aquifer. and so they told us that, actually, we should never use the word "wastewater." there need be no such thing. or i think of going to colombia, a privilege i had several years ago, and i got to meet women who had taken the waste from coffee, and which you can imagine there's quite a bit in colombia, mountains of it, and they were growing mushrooms with it. and they had this incredible mushroom business going. very poor women who were gaining these new cooperative skills and building a local business there, creating very high-quality food, a protein that they were adding to their diet. and someone estimated that if every coffee farm in the world were to do that, just had two jobs doing that, that would be 50 million new jobs that was -- oh, and then they take the waste from the mushroom production, whatever's left is fed to

livestock. so it's just a continuous feed, system. and you think of agroecology, also what that is about and restoring grasslands. it's about riding the carbon cycle, right? it's not just about growth per se in the unlimited nature, but it's about aligning our activities with the cycles of nature. so that's something of what i mean. so the limits frame that you mentioned that i was critiquing, i can certainly, absolutely, you know, there are many ways to talk about it. i'm just saying that i prefer to talk about the problem in a different way because i feel that if we just focus on the limits we think want tatively -- quantitatively, as if we fill something up, that's one of the metaphors that economists use, we fill up the earth when, actually, it doesn't help us see the ways we're actual destroying the regeneraltive power of

nature. it's not a quantitative filling up because most of us in the world are living without the most basic necessities. but i'd love to continue the discussion maybe afterward but it's a great question, thank you. >> i think we're going to make some time for some book signing up here, so join me in thanking -- [applause] >> thank you. thank you. and let me say, also, i'm very easy to find. i love to converse with you about your responses to anything that i've said, anything in the book, my books at all. i work in cambridge, i'm easy to find on the web, and it's info at small planet.org if you want to give me any sort of feedback, and i appreciate your being here. >> [inaudible] >> oh, and the sign-up sheet,

yes. the sign-up sheet went around if you would like to get our occasional e-letter, please -- i don't know where it is now. >> we'll have it at the table. >> oh, great. and thank you, thank you, thank you. and, here, i will sign books. [inaudible conversations] >> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org, or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> i look at why a country does well or why it doesn't, i think it's fundamentally a values thing. it's not natural resources. it's do you have -- these are two really crucial values -- do you believe the future can be different than the present, and do you believe you can control your future? these are not universal. some places they have it, some places they don't. the u.s. we have an exaggerated sense of how much control we have. [laughter] but it's good for us to have that. >> this sunday, your questions for author and new