Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Lappé brings message of hope to farm, food audiences

Back to Leopold Letter Winter 2011

If hope could be extracted, bottled and sold, Frances Moore Lappé would be its celebrity spokesperson on the late-night infomercial.

In October, nearly 40 years after she wrote Diet for a Small Planet that changed the way Americans view global hunger and natural resources, she brought her message of hope to central Iowa. Lappé spoke in Ames and at the Iowa Environmental Council annual conference in Des Moines about the newest of her 18 books, EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want. Her appearance was supported by a small grant from the Leopold Center’s competitive educational support program.

Lappé encouraged her audiences to become involved in big issues, and stressed that the way they think about those big issues may be key to solving them. She explained that the most common way to view global hunger or climate change is to focus on individuals who must compete for finite resources resulting in conditions that lead to scarcity, fear, lack of trust and a spiral of powerlessness.

“With an eco-mind, it’s all about connection throughout the natural world, where there is continuous change and creation,” she said.

She noted that this positive mindset in the local food movement and efforts to view farming as part of a larger, agro-ecological system. She offered numerous examples, taken from her book, where people are working together to re-forest a landscape, add to their food security and recycle wastes to keep local economies strong.

She warned against three conditions that “bring out the worst in us”: concentrated power, lack of transparency and blaming. To avoid these conditions, she urged listeners to support efforts and programs that lead to continuing dispersion of power, transparency and mutual accountability.

"We have much more power than we thought we did,” she said. “In fact, the only choice we don't have is whether to change the world. Because every act with an eco-mind, somebody's watching, somebody is affected, some reaction is happening - and even our inaction changes things around us, often in a way we don't wish, but nonetheless, it's power."

Back to Leopold Letter Winter 2011