Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [9]
My own hope is that as we center the critique of modern agriculture in a critique of the machine model of nature, we will move away from the notion of the rights of animals versus the rights of humans. We can begin instead to reconceive an organic whole in which a mutuality of interests can be found. Animals re-integrated into mixed farmsteads, with a rich variety of both animal and plant species, can begin to re-attune human beings to our place in nature alongside other animals, rather than over them, outside nature.
This shift allows activists to move away from a morally self-righteous, self-sacrificial tone and to call others toward a positive vision. A “correct diet,” one centered in the plant world, one based in less processed and nonchemically treated foods, is not a “should” as much as a freeing step. It helps us find our place in nature. In so doing, we are reminded of the primary fact of our being—that we are defined by relationships.
Toward a Politics of Hope
But, as we all know, it’s one thing to have a vision; it’s quite another to know how to manifest it. What could be a process for replacing the mechanistic and atomistic worldview with a relational, ecological vision? By the late 1980s, that was the question that pressed itself on me. What did this new worldview mean for our real-life, everyday existence in our complex world?
We human beings can come into harmony with the rest of the natural world, and free ourselves from life-stunting hunger and poverty, only as we together make different public choices—not only in agriculture but also across the full range of concerns. For me, however, suggesting what those different choices should be was inadequate—almost suspect—if I couldn’t also suggest how we might go about arriving at a broad consensus on those choices and actually putting them into practice in our lives.
Surely we need a process for choosing our future that is consistent with our social nature and reflective of the high stakes we now acknowledge. So, to me a most urgent question was no longer “What is the correct policy?” or “What is my vision of the future?” but rather: “What social processes for arriving at public choices best build on our little-tapped but innate capacities for relatedness inherent in the relational worldview?”
To begin to answer that question means to probe, in order to transform, the very meaning of democracy itself. For democracy in this culture is the term we use to describe the process of coming together to make public choices.
In other words, I had to stop describing the problem and start developing a philosophy of change. If we are in the midst of an historic shift in understanding, the death of the old worldview and the birth of the new, I believe we can each become conscious midwives to the birth. But not unless we are actively envisioning practical alternatives to our modern, alienating notion of politics.
The word “politics” itself has become debased. In polls of today’s young people, public officials are typically characterized as unprincipled. Words like “dishonest,” “corrupt,” “liars,” and “puppets” are common descriptions. Clearly we need a richer, stronger, more active vision of democracy to replace the dominant one, which is increasingly alienating, even insulting, to many Americans.
By mid-1990 I was ready to take the next big leap. I was determined to take on this challenge more directly. Food First, the organization I had founded in 1975 with Joseph Collins, was in good hands. It has thrived and had a major impact in part