Frances Moore Lappé is the author of  "Eco-Mind" is best known for her book 1971 best seller "Diet for a Small Planet." 

  

March 6, 2012

If you’ve ever finished reading an article about the environment and said to yourself, “I feel like I should do something but it seems hopeless,” this is a book for you. Frances Moore Lappé, author of Eco-Mind, knows what it’s like to feel despair when it comes to environmental issues.

A life-long activist for progressive causes, Lappé recounts her own struggles to stay motivated with regard to environmental problems. The more she heard about how terrible the crisis was, the more hopeless she felt.

“Berating, fear mongering and guilt tripping is the last thing that motivates us,” she said.

She realized that in order to galvanize herself, she had to find reasons to hope. She started by identifying seven core assumptions that held her back. Then one by one, she disputed their logic.

Lappé, who grew up in Fort Worth, has a history of confronting the status quo. Forty years ago, she wrote the groundbreaking 1971 book Diet For a Small Planet,” which criticized the food industry for its waste of resources and its promotion of unhealthy foods. The Cowtown native bucked common convention by advocating a meat-less diet.

  (Photo: Francis Moore Lappé's "Eco-Mind")

Lappé said she owes her outsider views to being raised by her “misfit” parents, John and Ina Moore. The couple helped found the liberal First Unitarian Church in Fort Worth at the onset of the McCarthy era. By day, Lappé was a cheerleader who dated the captain of the football team. Outside of school, she listened to her parents talk about civil rights and attended Liberal Religious Youth camp.


“I had this dual existence,” said the 68-year-old, who nows lives in Cambridge, Mass.

While her mother questioned spiritual ideas of the time, her father, a meteorologist, taught her to follow her interests wherever they led.

“He taught me if your interested in something, you can learn enough about it to actually say something about it,” she said.

Throughout her career, Lappé has tackled big issues, including world hunger and democracy. With her new book, she hopes to re-energize the environmental movement by offering new ways of thinking about old problems.

“Central to our ability to solve a problem is how we perceive the challenge, how we frame it,” writes Lappé.

Fixating on ideas like “consumer society is the problem” and “human beings are too greedy” discourages positive action, she says.

Lappé makes the case that we’re not a dangerous species destined to destroy the planet.


“Sure, we can be awful, but we have also evolved deep capacities for cooperation, empathy, fairness, meaning and creativity,” she said.

She argues that materialism is a recent obsession and our overconsumption is a symptom of an out-of-balance culture where people’s deeper needs are not being addressed. She believes that we can have progress, growth and the good life, if we can redefine those terms to include an enriching environment where both human beings and nature flourish.

And for those who say “it’s too late,” she says you never know when the next tipping point will come bad — or good.

Though powerful forces resist change, this century may be the era when “…humanity comes to realize its own true nature. And comes to see we are indeed part of nature…” writes Lappé.


A path forward will appear as we shift the way we look at things.

“Believing is seeing,” she writes in her book. “We need to think less about loss and more about possibility.”

For more about Lappé.


Stay up to date on everything green in North Texas, including the latest news and events! Sign up for the weekly Green Source DFW Newsletter! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Also check out our new podcast The Texas Green Report, available on your favorite podcast app.