April 13, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
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Surviving by
sharing
Mother and daughter team find cooperation the key to survival in new grassroots democracies
by Stephanie Hiller
"It was incredible to hear them describe how being a part
of this movement had changed their own relationship to
power." -- Anna Lappe speaking of the women in Kenya's Green
Belt Movement.
Frances Moore Lappe came to the attention of the new age movement with the publication of her groundbreaking book, Diet for a Small Planet, in 1971. There she argued persuasively that shifting our dietary preferences towards a plant-based diet was not only good for our health, but it guaranteed a far more abundant food supply for our burgeoning population. Demonstrating that the nutritional value of animal protein may be captured by combining grains and legumes in the appropriate ratios, and including a variety of recipes, the book became the rationale for many new vegetarians. More importantly, it laid waste to the view that there is a shortage of food; scarcity, Lappe argued, is the creation of capitalist economics gone awry.
The significance of this view can hardly be overstated. But although Lappe's work made its mark in the growing body of alternative theory, the food industry, increasingly corporatized, turned a blind eye.
Lappe wrote many other books along the same lines, 12 of them to be precise. And in 1999, her two adult children, observing that their generation remained uninformed of her discoveries, suggested she embark upon another, an update of the earlier work designed to attract the attention of the young. Frances took them up on it. With her daughter Anna, then 27, she toured the five continents in search of communities who had begun to take control of their own resources to produce locally grown, natural foods.
Published in 2001, Hope's Edge is a heartening foray into the emerging grassroots culture of people living close to the land and working together to provide for their communities. What Anna and her mother discovered is that in India, in Brazil, in Kenya, as in California, ordinary people are getting together to live sustainably, and even the very poor are proving that cooperation is evolution's best method of survival.
I met Frances and Anna in San Francisco last October, when they were getting ready to make a presentation at a fundraiser for the Women's Foundation. In a little restaurant up the street, we drank green tea and talked about their work.
What was your hope in publishing this
book?
Anna: One of our really big hopes was to take a look at the present and offer people a sequel to Diet for a Small Planet that would allow people to define all the complexities of political and economic questions but define them in a really practical way; something that was really thought provoking but also gave people a sense that their actions made a difference, … that their daily choices have these global ripples.
Frankie: To help people make sense of things; you know the metaphor of the drop in the bucket -- if there's a bucket, the bucket fills up fast. Our desire is to create a bucket to help people see the big container in which their individual choices are beginning to add up.
You've talked about how these communities, scattered across five continents, are re-creating democracy. You have called it "living democracy." Can you tell us about that?
Frankie: In some ways, yes, it's very different from the founders' concepts, the next stage of the founders concepts, but I do think living democracy is inherent in some of the best original ideas. Jefferson said, No one can be happy without participating in public power. I think that is the theme of living democracy, that it's not something done to us or for us, but is a way of life; shared responsibility I think is the key, the next stage in our evolution of our understanding of democracy. It's embodied in each of these stories.
Where is living democracy emerging in this country now?
Frankie: My first thought is a book I co authored in 1994, The Quickening of America. We look at education, social services, local government, business, and illustrated through stories, where living democracy is seen as something we create together rather than power that is held over us; and the notion of self-interest as being relational, and not simply protecting oneself from others but working with others to realize one's interests.
The reason we chose that term is that it suggests something that is living, that is organic, a verb that we live as well as an adjective.
We were so thrilled when we were in that little seed room at the foot of the Himalayas [at a meeting of Navdanya in India], they had independently come up with those words.
Anna, you're involved with Unreasonable Women for the Earth. Can you tell us something about that organization?
It's not an organization, we all are one already. It's about claiming our inner unreasonableness.
Diane Wilson lives in the most toxic county in the entire country. She has been fighting the chemical companies. The year before last, at the Bioneers Conference [held each October in San Rafael, CA] she said, We need more unreasonable women. Look where reason has gotten us! So a group of us unreasonable women got together last May for a retreat.
One of the things that really struck us is feeling this need to support each other as unreasonable women in doing in whatever we do, whatever way you embody your vision.
And also, what was clear at the Bioneers. We invited women to come to a workshop. Of all the workshops, it was the best attended. More than 1000 people showed up.
What was so clear is that women were saying I want to be a part of this.
I heard about the consciousness raising groups of the 60s. In some ways it's a revival of that, of realizing the importance of having a network of strong women.
It's really unstructured. We'd love it to flourish.
What was the most important impact this journey had on you in a personal way?
Frankie What changed me forever but I really feel that those people are with me forever. I just feel all those people in Brazil, those people we met are absolutely indelible…
I guess somehow early on in my life, I gave myself this job description of being the cheer leader, trying to show people that hunger is not inevitable, that there are possibilities blah blah blah. It's one thing to self-assign, and then actually to go, and to be with these people who are actually doing this, it made these ideas come alive. All of my life, talking about how human beings are not simply these materialist consumers, and then to be around all these people who just assume that everyone wants to have communities that work for everyone, I guess that made me believe my rhetoric.
Anna: For me what was really striking was feeling this deep sense of connection and similarity in all these different places. It sounds corny but really feeling this deep connection as a human being. We so felt that we all really want to connect with one another. We heard it in so many different languages! I really feel that I'm being called to do things that are beyond my comfort zone. It's the faces and the voices of the people in the book who have given me the courage.
What is the role of women in these communities?
Anna: We didn't set out to tell the story of strong women leaders around the world. We knew about Vandana Shiva in India and Wangari Maathai in Kenya, but what really struck us is how in every community the women were really playing leadership roles throughout all of the different movements. That was especially true in Kenya in the Green Belt movement. To see what has happened after years of colonialism and structural adjustment programs by the IMF, they have really decimated the men's community -- a lot of the men had been pushed off the land, had gone into the cities to get work; a lot of the men had alcohol problems, a lot of the ypung men were going into the militiary -- we didn't see the presence of a lot of men. Wangari Maathai's program originally was about tree planting but it quickly became a woman's empowerment movement, and she quickly saw that women would take on the power to move that change. It was incredible to hear them describe how being a part of this movement had changed their own relationship to power.
In India, we went to focus on Vandana Shiva's work, and yet the movement that she is crafting there is largely a farmer's network, they were all men. There were some women in New Delhi but in the villages most of the people involved were men. What we really saw was there that was really entrenched division. Vandana's sister is a doctor, and she reported horrific incidence of female infanticide, so much so that when were there they'd actually passed a law that prohibited doctors from telling the sex of the fetuses. The fact that a law had to be instituted indicates how deep the division is.
A lot of Vandana's work is around the connections between the feminine and the environmernt, trying to make these connections between industrialized monoculture dominating agriculture and the repression of women But she's still fighting within this context.
These successful movements, we want to hang them as perfect, successful in all their different ways, but they're still moving within an international cutlure where women were second class citizens
In the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, they had started a national dialogue about gender two years before within the movement. The very first seminar we attended there, in Parana, was a former nun talking about what does gender mean, feminism 101, opening that dialogue… There were about 100 people there, many of them women, talking about how important it was to have more women coming to the meeting, the demonstrations… I had never seen an organization be so honest in grappling with that question and I was really impressed with that.
The Grameen bank in Bangladesh does find that when women are loaned money, they pay it back. But even though members were women, borrowing the money, their husbands were stealing the money from them. So a lot of work is being done to talk about gender.
Anna, do you feel that you and your generation have been more empowered to take up leadership?
Anna: What I've seen in my generation is two really opposite things have happened. I studied with Ted Sizer, so on the one hand I was really involved in rethinking how we educate and empower young people; and, on the other hand, I think we've been witness to the most disempowering trend, the complete commercialization of educational space.
How does the threat of war in Iraq impact your work?
Anna: I feel even more committed to the work we've been doing, but I also feel a sense of urgency to get involved to protest the war. I feel our story, our work, Hope's Edge,is so much related. So much of the discourse cuts up into separate issues, but they're all part of the whole picture.
Will the war derail some of the progress we've made?
Anna: Well yeah. As my friend Pramila Jayapal of Hate Free Zone in Seattle said, what we've seen since Sept 11 is a complete erosion of what our constitution has stood for.
Frankie: One of the themes of the book is the way that fear operates in our society even before 9-11 and how driven our society is by fear. I had an interesting encounter with a Boston cabdriver. He was from Russia. I asked him how he liked this country, and he said, "You're all afraid. This whole country is in fear. We were afraid of the KGB, but you're all afraid of each other."
This culture of fear is part of the invisible ether that is unspoken.
We evolved knowing that our survival depends on staying with the tribe. Expulsion was the ultimate punishment. Now that our whole culture is on a death march, survival means separating from the tribe. That brings up fear. So in a way what we say in Hope's Edge is that by introducing you to these people we're hoping you'll vicariously feel part of a new tribe that will give you courage and succour to be able to listen to yourself and not just be driven by the fear.
What was it like Frankie, traveling with your daughter?
I've written 14 books, I co-authored most of them, but I have to say that my daughter was the greatest experience. The energy exchange, the ease and the fun with which we worked things out, it was a dream. I'm just so fortunate because of the daughter I have, I had such incredible trust in her competence, she handled some of the major arrangements. And just to be able to share the memories of all the crazy things that inevitably happen. We also did this whole book tour of 30 cities.
No struggles?
Anna: I think when we were travelling, it really was dream like in how it all happened. I feel like the universe supported us.
F. We didn't know what we'd find.
A: I think she felt more of the pressure and the deadline fear. One of the things we consciously decided, we wanted the book to have a narrative voice and we wanted that to be my mother's, but we actually co-wrote it.
What was it like, Frankie, when you had young children, juggling all that work and raising a family?
That's a big topic. One of the reasons it worked so beautifully is that they have a fabulous father. Marc Lappe. We divorced when they were young, but he's been a full parent. When my kids were with him, that's when I did a lot of the travelling. My life when they were growing up was pretty much was them and my work. I didn't have friends. I think I had a baby sitter once. Because when I had them with me, I didn't want to miss a second. I took them with me to Guatemala when Anna was 3, and then we went to Nicaragua together when she was in high school. I tried wherever possible to involve them in what I was doing.
A: the work she was doing, she could bring the work home, so even though she was working, it was that presence.
In the book you talk about "thought traps" that limit our ability to envision a different future, and you refer to the importance of horizontal relationships or partnerships. It reminds me of Riane Eisler's new book, The Power of Partnerships. How does your work relate to the knowledge we now have of the ancient goddess cultures?
F. I loved the Chalice and the Blade. I've been recently moved by a book called The Intimate History of Humanity. His thesis is that it's only as we develop relationships of partnership between the genders that we can create living democracy. That's really a theme of my life, and that's why I feel so hopeful about my children's generation because I can feel so much the difference. There's a cultural change. I see that with my daughter's relationship with her partner and my son as well.
Anna and Frankie are continuing their speaking tour to promote this book. Frankie will be appearing with Vandana Shiva and Helena Nordberg-Hodge at a conference to be held in India. Anna is also working on her own writing, and is helping to produce a documentary "looking at the disappearance what we think of as middle class, the vanishing American dream." She's also working on another small book on media and democracy, trying to present "the context of the crisis of media in the country and alternatives to it like your publication."
The work of the Lappes is very much in line with that of other progressive scholars like Helena Norberg-Hodge, who are emphasizing the importance of local economies. Next week we will include a review of Helena's latest book, Bringing the Food Economy Home.
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For more information, visit the Lappes' web site