EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want

by Frances Moore Lappé

A moment of dissonance can be terrifying. But it can also be a great gift—a liberating whack.

the most stunning implication of an ecological way of seeing: endless possibility.

Since what we’ve been calling “growth” is largely waste and destruction, let’s call it what it is: a system that in fact stymies growth and even quickens diminution and death—of genetic and social diversity, health, relationships, beauty, happiness, art forms, languages, and ancient knowledge.

Evidence suggests a basic design flaw in our peculiar version of a market. Markets have served humankind for millennia, but we’ve turned this useful tool into a formula for disaster—a market that ends up producing waste and destruction because it is largely driven by one-rule: Pursue what brings the most immediate and highest return to existing wealth holders.

our market concentrates financial returns so tightly that most of the earth’s people experience scarcity, no matter how much we produce.

As wealth concentrates and the idea of a public good loses favor, our communications media over the last thirty years have become themselves highly concentrated private-profit centers, no longer serving the essential, independent function of a free press envisioned by our founders.

those with wealth and vested interest in denying climate science can use the media to shape public perception.

the root of our crisis as a “one-rule economy” that, first, is unable to register its destruction; second, inexorably concentrates wealth; and third, deprives us of an open, fair exchange of ideas.

In 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt described the danger of our current predicament with startling candor: The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.35

putting private over public interest—that is killing us.

But “consumer society is to blame,” as a central environmental message, can’t work. Even the word “consumer” misleads, since none of us consumes anything. Whether it’s food or a laptop, we are mere “passthroughs,” and all that passes through us goes somewhere. We may think we throw things away, but there is no such place as “away” in an ecological system.

In a one-rule economy, wealth inexorably moves into fewer and fewer hands, so that more and more “demand” comes from fewer and fewer people.