In an all-new episode, Steve D'Agostino, chief pilot of Best Rate of Climb, interviews Frances Moore Lappe, author of EcoMind. They talk about changing the way we think, to create the world we want.
Reports of our planet appear uniformly calamitous, as our climate becomes more chaotic, hunger spreads, and each day species are lost forever. Yet, these crises aren't our core challenge, argues Lappe, an environmentalist and best-selling author. According to her, solutions are known or near at hand.
What is holding us back, is a deeper crisis: Our own crippling state of mind, which creates a feeling of powerlessness that causes us to create a world none of us want. What could be powerful enough to rob us of power to act on what we know? Lappe’s answer is "the power of ideas."
In EcoMind, Lappe presents evidence that human beings see the world through the filter of our core beliefs -- what she calls our "mental map." The disempowering premise of our prevailing mental map is “lack:” There's not enough of anything, from energy and food to goodness in human nature. This premise of "lack of goods and goodness," she says, breeds fear, guilt and despair -- and ends up creating the very scarcity we are trying to escape.
According to Lappe, today's dominant mental map is unscientific and out-of-sync with what we now know about nature - including our own nature. With insight from neuroscience and ecology's lessons of connectedness and change, we can, however, learn to "think like an ecosystem." Through this emerging mental map, we can suddenly see possibility all around us and realize our power to change course. This internal transformation marks the cultivation of our "eco-mind." Drawing on anthropology, biology, ecology, neuroscience and psychology, she uniquely reframes our environmental and social crises. .
