Creating an ecology of hope

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Creating an ecology of hope

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by Mark Karlin on January 6, 2012

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/creating-an-ecology-of-hope/

Frances Moore Lappé: Some “thought traps” can feel like no-brainers, like “We’ve hit the limits”, or, “Since growth is killing our planet, we must adopt no-growth economies”. I call them traps because they can defeat us by evoking fear, when psychologists tell us that fear actually makes most people more materialistic and self-centred. Just as troubling, they bless what we’re doing now with a term — growth — most of us experience as positive. Don’t we want our children, our plants and our love to grow? And the opposite of “growing” is shriveling and dying — not very appealing.

These frames don’t help people see that our economy is really more about waste and destruction than growth. Scientists report that from 55 to 87 percent of energy in the US is wasted. Roughly 40 percent of the food in the US is wasted, and that’s before counting the scary reality that 40 percent of what the US eats is empty calories.

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The failing notion of democracy we’ve grown up with — something done to us or for us — can’t work. Living democracy does work because it’s aligned with human nature. Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet’s challenges. We’re “soft-wired” for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to “make a dent,” as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities.

With an eco-mind, it becomes obvious that, as with any other organism in nature, whether qualities get expressed depends hugely on context. So, living democracy creates the context — the rules and norms — proven to elicit these positive qualities and to keep in check our equally obvious capacities for cruelty. At least three conditions seem pretty sure to elicit the worst: concentration of power, secrecy (the slogan of Wall Street insiders creating toxic derivatives was IBG, YBG — I’ll be gone; you’ll be gone — they knew they could escape unseen), plus a culture of blame. If I’m right, it’s clear what we do: Step up to create the opposite conditions — the continuous dispersion of power, transparency and mutual accountability in human relations. That’s living democracy.