Getting a Grip - Frances Lappe

[Linnea]

Frances Moore Lappe - on her new book, Getting a Grip:

'...as we come to appreciate and enjoy nature’s laws, learning to live within a self-renewing ecological home, we discover there’s more than enough for all to live well.

This realization I first experienced as a lightning bolt, when in my twenties I learned that there was more than enough food in the world to make us all chubby…and there still is, even considering staggering built-in waste.

I learned that we create the scarcity we fear.

Worldwide, for example, more than a third of all grain and 90 percent of soy gets fed to livestock.

I learned that this irrationality took off, even though inefficient and harmful to health, because one-rule economics leaves millions of people too poor to buy food and keeps grain so cheap that it’s profitable to feed vast amounts to animals.

Beyond food, the U.S. economy remains “astoundingly” wasteful, conclude the authors of Natural Capitalism, as “only 6 percent of its vast flows of materials actually end up in products.”

Imagine, then, the potential plenty, not to mention health benefits, as we shift toward equity and efficiency.

Similar plenty appears once we drop the scarcity lens surrounding energy. Our sun, wind, waves, water, and biomass offer us a “daily dose of energy” 15,000 times greater than in all the planet-harming fossil and nuclear power we now use, says German energy expert Hermann Scheer. Just one-fifth of the energy in wind alone would, if converted to electricity, meet the whole world’s energy demands, reports a Stanford-NASA study.

An awareness of plenty itself undermines a focus on raw, self-centered competition, leaving us able to refocus not on the goodness of human nature, which seems to deny human complexity, but on the undeniable goodness in human nature, including the deep positive needs and capacities just mentioned.

From there, the Spiral of Empowerment quickens. We gain confidence that we can learn to make sound decisions together about the rules that further healthy communities. Then, as we begin to succeed and ease the horrific oppression and conflict that now rob us of life, we reinforce positive expectations about our species. The destructive mental map loosens its hold. And as these capacities and needs—for fairness, connection, efficacy, and meaning—find avenues for expression, they redound, generating even more creative decision making and outcomes.

So “getting a grip” doesn’t have to mean a sober struggle. From this more complete view of our own nature and of what nature offers, could it instead become an exhilarating adventure?'

http://www.gettingagrip.net/look-inside ... powerment/

I ordered this book and should receive it in a few days.

Anyone else reading it? It sounds fantastic! We need ideas and leaders as these to move on to Type One civilization.