Anna Lappe & Frances Moore Lappe: Every Choice We Make Can Be a Celebration of the World We Want

Two amazing women! ~

Anna Lappe and her mother Frances Moore Lappe

I recently had the honor and gift of seeing Anna Lappe speak here in Portland. I had already seen her mother speak twice in the past, and the last time I asked Frances Moore Lappe to autograph her Diet For a Small Planet, which I had purchased nearly four decades ago.

Now Anna Lappe is standing in her own power and acting to make a difference in the world. Please check out their website The Small Planet Institute and the invaluable books that both of these amazing women have written. Also important is to view the video of the "Real Story of the Boston Tea Party" and more. It is exciting that there is so much to learn! And while it might seen as negative, I experience it as very empowering to know that what we eat has a huge impact on ourselves, our children, the planet. We have choices! Knowledge is empowering!

Tag, we are all it! Peace ~ Molly

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Thoughts from the Lappe's:

Every choice we make can be a celebration of the world we want.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy.

An MRI study of people competing vs. cooperating found that cooperating stimulates the same parts of our brain as does eating chocolate.

Ninety percent of Americans make less in real dollars than they did in 1973 – on average $4,000 less. The wealthiest 400 Americans now control more wealth than half the world’s people.

Worldwide, more people are members of cooperatives than own shares in publicly traded companies; cooperatives provide a fifth more jobs than do global corporations.

Democracy is not what we have, it is what we do.

More than a third of both the world’s grain and fish catch now go to feed livestock, which return to us only a fraction of the nutrients.

If the whole world adopted sustainable farming practices, production could increase by over 50 percent.

In three decades agricultural output per person has climbed by one fifth worldwide, but in just the last two years over 100 million more people suffer from hunger—reaching a total of nearly a billion.

America emits twice the carbon per person that Europe does. But think what’s possible: California emits 20 percent less carbon per dollar GDP than Germany; and it gets a quarter of its electricity from renewables!

Can we truly believe ‘the world’ can change if we don’t experience ourselves changing? And there’s only one way to change ourselves – that’s by taking risks.

Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.

In Washington DC, more than two dozen lobbyists push mainly corporate interests for every one representative American citizens have elected to protect our interests.

Every time we act, even with our fear, we make room for others to do the same. Courage is contagious.

It’s not possible to know what’s possible. So we are free to go for the world we really want.

Hope is not something we seek in evidence, it is what we become in action.