Frances Moore Lappe

Why are millions starving in a world full of food?

To which she replied, "Fine. Let's box it up and send it to them."

Everybody knows that extreme poverty, including starvation, just IS. It's always been, and it's caused by lack of wealth. Ask any first-grader: If you've got enough money, you can buy food, and then you're not hungry anymore.

My friend Cammie, a first-grader herself, tried to explain this to me.

"Why are those kids hungry?" I asked her as we watched a special on Mother Theresa.

"Because they don't have enough food," she said. Duh.

"Uh-huh, but why?"

She thought about it for a bit, then shrugged and said, "They lost their lunch money?"

Yeah, or somebody beat them up and took it. We'll talk about colonialism another day; )

Our wastefulness is causing scarcity for the rest of the world

In other words, food itself isn't scarce. There's plenty to feed everybody (still). But what Frances found was that the very things which were being promoted to combat the imaginary scarcity and feed the starving millions were actually causing scarcity...

...through wasting resources.

"Here, in the US, only one to six percent of all the stuff that goes into producing things turns up as products we can actually use," she goes on. "We waste more than 90 percent." Read this exerpt from "Natural Capitalism" about familiar products and what goes into producing them.)

"We humans are creating scarcity - exactly what we say we most fear." She says.

"But we go on swallowing the prevailing framing of the problem as scarcity, we go on bowing to 'experts'..." who say we need new technologies and ever more wasteful farming methods to combat the scarcity.

For the sake of the starving, of course.

She asks, "Why have we, as societies, created that which as individuals we abhor?" Speaking of the US and other wealthy - wasteful - nations.

• No one of us would choose to let a child die of hunger or preventable disease, let alone 32,000 children a day.
• No one would intentionally destroy so many species in just this century that it could take the planet 10 million years to recover.
• No one would seek to poke a hole the size of a continent in the ozone layer, causing cancer deaths to soar.
• No one would decide to create a greenhouse effect disrupting life in ways we are only barely beginning to understand, or make our food production - our fossil-fuel-driven industrial model - into one of the biggest culprits, responsible for about one-fifth of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
• No one would consciously design a world community in which a few hundred individuals control as much wealth as half the world's population; and where - as it is here at home (the US) - 1 percent end up with more than do the bottom 95 percent combined.

Our human brains are so big we can't seem to help tripping over them.

Because we can't imagine doing anything else. Read more on this here.

"In part, I believe, because we've lost confidence in the one thing each of us has: our common sense," she says. "We let paralyzing messages intrude; "they know better"....or "I don't know enough". Even if we don't say these words, the feelings are often there."

Frances talks about 5 "thought traps", or the delusions that "limit our imagination and help to create the hunger, poverty, and environmental devastation all around us":

• The enemy is scarcity, production is our savior. With the human population doubling every fifty years or so, there just isn't enough stuff to go around...like land, food, and water. To survive, we have to produce more and more.
• Thank our selfish genes. We're selfish by nature. Actually, that's the trait that catapulted us to the top of the food chain. It might not be pretty, but it worked. Who wants to argue with Darwin?
• Let the market decide, experts preside. Since we're a greedy bunch, it's a good thing we can count on the market to keep everything balanced out so YOUR self-interest doesn't overwhelm MY self-interest. And when that's not enough, thank goodness there are experts around whose technological genius will keep us one step ahead of scarcity.
• Solve by dissection. Everybody knows that a problem is really just a bunch of little problems all smooshed together in a messy glop. Pick all the little problems apart and solve them, and don't worry about the interconnections.
• Welcome to the end of history. Global, multinational corporate rule is the product of years of economic evolution, and represents the best system we've ever had, and is the best we'll ever be able to do.

Exerpt, liberally paraphrased by me, from "Hope's Edge", a collaborative effort between Frances and her daughter, Anna. Visit Small Planet Institute for more information on their work.

What "thought traps" keep us PINNED TO THE PUMP?

...when we really don't want to?

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