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Frances Moore Lappé
“Some of the 20th century’s most vibrant activist thinkers have been American women – Margaret Mead, Jeanette Rankin, Barbara Ward, Dorothy Day – who took it upon themselves to pump life into basic truths. Frances Moore Lappé is among them.” —The Washington Post
My Story…
The 2007 release of Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad continues a journey of more than three decades. At each stage I’ve tried to pull away the next layer of causation to grasp the roots of needless suffering. I’ve wanted to help free myself and others to act on our deep yearning for effectiveness in the world and for solidarity with our fellow humans.
The beginning: the needlessness of hunger…
As a young woman in the 1960s, I awakened to the tragedy of global hunger. I was determined to share my startling discovery that hunger is needless. There is more than enough food in the world for all to thrive; and, since hunger is made by human beings, we have the power to end it. With this message, my first book, Diet for a Small Planet hit the stands in 1971, and I quickly learned I had a lot of company. Millions of others were seeking ways to link their lives, their everyday choices, to create the world we want.
My intuition told me that food – personal, yet universal – was a uniquely powerful entry point for understanding and action. So, with former seminarian and activist Joseph Collins in 1975 I co-founded Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy. For the next 15 years I co-authored or authored ten other books and many reports and articles on the myths of hunger and how U.S. policies and economic dogma help create the very hunger and underdevelopment we abhor.
Still making waves after almost 30 years, Food First was once described by The New York Times as one of the nation’s “most respected food think tanks.” For me our message boiled down to this: “Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy.”
A scarcity of democracy…
But where is this democracy strong enough to end hunger? And what does it look like? Unable to answer, I knew I had to probe more deeply. Believing that solutions did not lie in some new blueprint or dogma handed down from on high, I wanted to engage Americans in thinking through the values that could guide them in finding solutions for themselves. So I wrote Rediscovering America’s Values, a dialogue on freedom, the market, democracy, and justice. I hoped the dialogue in this book would trigger thousands of others in homes and church basements across America.
Soon I began to see that a richer, more inclusive practice of democracy was already emerging. But, I realized that it was sadly still invisible to most people and easily reversed. So in 1990 I left Food First to found The Center for Living Democracy in Brattleboro, Vermont. I wanted to help people see that effective democracy – capable of ending hunger and environmental devastation – was more than a particular structure of government. It is a living practice, a vibrant culture of mutual responsibility. In 1994 my book The Quickening of America: Rebuilding Our Nation, Remaking Our Lives (Jossey-Bass) brought this vision to life in real stories across every dimension of American public life.
Knowing that we humans take our cues from each other, I sought to create a democratic “social multiplier” by spreading stories of regular citizens in action. Why not a national news service? In 1995 I became founding editor of The American News Service and over the next five years our terrific staff placed solutions-oriented news stories in more than 300 papers, including almost half of the nation’s top 100 newspapers by circulation. Because of ANS, millions of Americans read about people like themselves coming up with creative solutions to problems that ranged from education to race relations to the environment.
Hope in action…
Then in 2000, my children encouraged me to return to my roots, linking all I’d learned about democracy, hunger and the crying need for people to see real examples of hope in action. So my daughter Anna and I traveled on five continents to write Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, released in 2002. In it, we pick up where the original Diet leaves off. We identify the roots of needless misery in the dominant “mental map” that blinds us to solutions in our own interest. Through the narrative of our journey, readers meet movements of citizens breaking free of this destructive mental map. They show us possibilities for going beyond today’s consumerism and the isolation of me-first capitalism to both heal ourselves and our planet.
While writing Hope’s Edge, I was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, at the Center for Reflective Community Practice. Anna and I were so happy when Jane Goodall called Hope’s Edge: “Absolutely one of the most important books as we enter the 21st century.”
Removing the obstacles within ourselves…
While writing Hope’s Edge I was struck by the courage of regular people; yet during this time I myself struggled inside with a great deal of fear. Both my public journey and my inner life helped me to see the ways that fear -- our misunderstanding of it -- traps us into creating the stunted lives and a polarized world none of us want. So with Jeffrey Perkins, I wrote You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear (Tarcher/Penguin 2004). It challenges seven old, limiting ideas about fear and, through stories of real people, offers seven freeing ideas.
My current excitement…
In the fall of 2007, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad, a distillation of the core messages of my five most recent books, was released. In it, I peel away yet another layer of causation. At the root of our global crisis, I argue, are feelings of powerlessness flowing inexorably from a false premise of lack—lack of both goods and goodness. With what I like to call heart-centered realism, I maintain that we create our world according to ideas we hold. I challenge readers to rethink core ideas that rob of us power—ideas of fear, democracy, power and evil itself.
Getting a Grip builds especially on my 2006 Democracy’s Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life that helps readers fight despair and to learn from Living Democracy emerging in America.
Over these 30-plus years I have experienced our world moving rapidly in two directions at once. In one direction I see heightened violence, polarization, environmental devastation and fear. In this direction lies deepening despair because people now see that thin democracy – something done to us or for us – cannot solve these problems.
In the other direction, I see Living Democracy emerging. People in all walks of life are rejecting the “daddy politics” of thin democracy. They are taking responsibility, claiming their voices and innovating successes across challenges as diverse as education, economics, criminal justice and food. Their impact is already so great – albeit still largely invisible – I could never have imagined it possible when I began my journey.
So, as never before on our small planet, we humans can see a clear choice. Choosing Living Democracy means choosing to act. And therein lies hope, for one certainty I’ve gained in these three decades is this: Hope is not what we find in evidence; it is what we become in action.
Recognition of Frances Moore Lappé’s Work
Frances Moore Lappé’s books have been used in a broad array of courses in hundreds of colleges and universities and in more than 50 countries. They have been translated into over a dozen languages. Lappé’s life and work have been featured in O Magazine, Glamour, People Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Utne Reader, Vegetarian Times, and many other publications. Lappé’s articles have appeared in publications as diverse as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Readers' Digest, Christian Century, Chemistry, Le Monde Diplomatique, National Civic Review, Tikkun, and Harper’s. In the summer of 2004 both Hope’s Edge and You Have the Power ranked in the top 20 among Amazon’s best sellers in the category of philosophy and ethics.
Her television and radio appearances:
Lappé appears regularly on radio and television. She has been on PBS with Bill Moyers, the Today Show, CBS Radio, and National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. Lappé’s work has been featured in several television documentaries, including an hour-long special, Democratic Allsorts, devoted to her life that aired in Australia and Great Britain.
Honors:
Lappé has received 17 honorary doctorates from distinguished institutions, including the University of Michigan, Kenyon College, Allegheny College, and Lewis and Clark College. During October, 2007 she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Suffolk University in Boston, MA.
In 1987 in Sweden, Lappé became the fourth American to receive the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “Alternative Nobel,” for her “vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity.” In 2007 Lappé was one of fifty founding councilors, from over twenty countries, to establish the World Future Council based in Hamburg, Germany.
In her 30s, Lappé received the annual Mademoiselle magazine award, honoring young American women leaders. In 2000, she was inducted into Natural Health Magazine's Hall of Fame. In 2003 she received the Rachel Carson Award from the National Nutritional Foods Association. Lappé’s book awards include the World Hunger Media Award and the Henry George Award as well as, in 2003, the Nautilus Award for Hope’s Edge in the category of social change from NAPRA, the network of alternative publishers and retailers. She was also chosen in 2003 by artist Robert Shetterly as one of 50 Americans to be part of his traveling portrait exhibition, Americans Who Tell the Truth, now also a book.
Frances Moore Lappé serves as an advisor to:
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