[Lapg] Free Your (Eco)Mind,Think like an ecosystem, and you just might save the world. Frances Moore Lappé Feb 01, 2012 Yes Magazine

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

ECOSYSTEMS | HAPPINESS | COMMUNITY
Free Your (Eco)Mind
Think like an ecosystem, and you just might save the world.
by Frances Moore Lappé

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/9-strategies-to-end-corporate-rule/free-your-eco-mind?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yes%2Fplanet+%28PLANET+-+YES%21+magazine%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

posted Feb 01, 2012
Gradually it’s dawned on me: We humans are creatures of the mind. We 
perceive the world according to our core, often unacknowledged, 
assumptions. They determine, literally, what we can see and what we 
cannot. Nothing so wrong with that, perhaps—except that, in this crucial 
do-or-die moment, we’re stuck with a mental map that is life-destroying.

And the premise of this map is lack—not enough of anything, from energy 
to food to parking spots; not enough goods and not enough goodness. In 
such a world, we come to believe, it’s compete or die. The popular 
British writer Philip Pullman says, “we evolved to suit a way of life 
which is acquisitive, territorial, and combative” and that “we have to 
overcome millions of years of evolution” to make the changes we need to 
avoid global catastrophe.

If I believed that, I’d feel utterly hopeless. How can we align with the 
needs of the natural world if we first have to change basic human nature?

An eco-mind thinks ...

Less about quantities and more about qualities.

Less about fixed things and more about the ever-changing relationships 
that form them.

Less about limits and more about alignment.

Less about what and more about why.

Less about loss and more about possibility.

Fortunately, we don’t have to. A new way of seeing that is opening up to 
us can form a more life-serving mental map. I call it “eco-mind”—looking 
at the world through the lens of ecology. This worldview recognizes that 
we, no less than any other organism, live in relation to everything 
else. As the visionary German physicist Hans-Peter Dürr puts it, “There 
are no parts, only participants.”

As part of this shift, breakthroughs in a range of disciplines are 
confirming what we already know about ourselves, if we stop and think 
about it: That humans are complex creatures and what we do—from raising 
children to caring for elders to sharing with our neighbors—exhibits at 
least as much natural tendency to cooperate as to compete.

The view that our species is basically brutal defies the evidence: 
“There is a very tiny handful of incidences of conflict and possible 
warfare before 10,000 years ago,” says archaeologist Jonathan Haas of 
the Field Museum in Chicago, “and those are very much the exception.” 
Our species has a vastly longer experience evolving in close-knit 
communities, knowing our lives depended on one another. The result is at 
least six inherent traits we can foster, once we learn to navigate the 
world with the map of eco-mind.

1. Cooperation
It turns out that cooperating and co-creating explain our evolutionary 
success just as much as competition does. No wonder neuroscientists 
using fMRI scans discovered that when human beings cooperate, our 
brains’ pleasure centers are as stimulated as when we eat chocolate!

And what were the ­evolutionary pressures that turned us into cooper­ators?

Human beings are creatures of meaning, seeking ways to give our days 
value beyond ensuring our own survival.
In her 2009 book Mothers and ­Others, University of California, Davis, 
anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy challenged the accepted belief that 
our penchant for cooperation emerged through bonding to fight our 
neighbors. No, she says. Over most of the 200,000 years we’ve been 
around, there were simply too few of us to warrant fighting over 
territory. Instead, our capacity for cooperation evolved in response to 
our unique breeding culture.

While other primates generally don’t trust others to care for their 
infants, humans have long turned to aunties, grandmas, and friends to 
help care for their babies from birth. With these “helpers,” children 
have the “luxury of growing up slowly, building stronger bodies, better 
immune systems, and in some cases bigger brains,” Hrdy surmises.

It is this capacity for cooperation, honed through shared child rearing, 
that most distinguishes Homo sapiens, claims Hrdy.

2. Empathy
Cooperation is made possible by empathy, and it, too, seems to be a 
capacity deeply carved into us. We see a hint of early empathy in the 
finding that babies cry at the sound of other babies crying but rarely 
at a recording of their own cries.

In the 1990s, Italian scientists first discovered what many now see as a 
cellular foundation of empathy: “mirror neurons” in our brains. When we 
are only observing another’s actions, it turns out, these neurons fire 
as if we were actually performing the observed actions ourselves. 
Evidence grows that mirror neurons respond to emotional states as well 
as actions.

A study in Science in 2008 reported that we actually get greater 
pleasure from giving than receiving. Given what we are learning about 
our cooperative, empathetic capacities, it should be no surprise that 
psychologists estimate that, on average, more than 80 percent of 
happiness comes from relationships, health, spiritual life, friends, and 
work fulfillment. Only 7 percent is about money.

3. Fairness
Fairness lives within most of us, for we learned long ago that injustice 
destroys community—the bonds of trust on which our individual survival 
depends.

Plus, fairness seems to make us feel good, even when at our own expense, 
Nature reported in 2010. In a simple experiment, pairs of young men were 
given $30 apiece, while one in each pair got a $50 bonus. The brain’s 
reward center responded in those who got the bonus. No surprise. The 
surprise came when those lucky men were asked to imagine how they would 
feel if they got another bonus, or if the next bonus went to their 
partners. The second scenario, the one reducing inequality, was the one 
that lit up the brain’s pleasure center.

4. Efficacy
Could our species have made it this far if we were essentially couch 
potatoes, shoppers, and whiners? I don’t think so. We are doers. Our 
need to “make a dent” in the wider world is so great, argued social 
philosopher Erich Fromm, that we should toss out René Descartes’ 
theorem, “I think, therefore I am,” and replace it with: “I am, because 
I effect.”

The trait seems to show up even in tiny babies. Three-month-olds respond 
with pleasure to a moving mobile. But a study shows that they “prefer to 
look at [a] … mobile they can influence themselves,” writes Professor 
Alison Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby. Plus, “they smile and coo at it 
more too.” For Gopnik, the finding suggests that even the youngest among 
us enjoy making things happen and seeing the consequences.

In a widely known experiment carried out in the 1970s, Harvard 
psychologists Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin divided nursing home 
residents into two groups. In one, residents had choices as to where to 
receive visitors and when to watch movies; they were also given 
houseplants to care for. Residents in the second group did not have 
these choices.

After a year and a half, the Harvard investigators found that fewer than 
half as many residents in the more engaged group had died. Langer 
attributes the stunning difference to the enhanced “mindfulness” of 
those making more choices. I see the outcome ­differently. For me, the 
longer lives of those responsible for themselves and their plants affirm 
that we thrive when we feel we have power.

5. Meaning
Human beings are creatures of meaning, seeking ways to give our days 
value beyond ensuring our own survival. The prominence of religion 
certainly attests to this need. But even the private act of voting may 
express this need, it dawned on me recently. Rationally, I can easily 
see that my single vote isn’t likely to decide anything. But entering 
the voting booth, I feel a quiet sense of pride welling up because I 
know I’m playing my part in a larger human drama—protecting a democratic 
ideal by my act.

6. Imagination, Creativity, and Attraction to Change
In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik writes: “More than any other creature, 
human beings are able to change. … What neuroscientists call 
plasticity—the ability to change in light of experience—is the key to 
human nature at every level from brains to minds to societies.” The 
great evolutionary advantage of human beings is our ability to escape 
the constraints of instinct, Gopnik reminds us.

Both “using tools and making plans … depend on anticipating future 
possibilities,” and we can see these “abilities emerging even in babies 
who can’t talk yet.”
Human beings’ unique capacity for imagination ends this list 
because—coupled with our plasticity—it is what enables us to envision 
and make the changes we must in order to draw forth the other five 
essential qualities. And it is this imaginative self that takes pleasure 
in the challenge.

But if we’re so great . . .

Eco-Mind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want
by Frances Moore Lappé
Nation Books, 2011, 304 pages, $26.00

Support YES! when you buy here from an independent bookseller.

If humans are all the above, then why in the world do we mindlessly 
participate every day in a social ecology that generates so much 
destruction and misery for so many?

For me, answering that question starts with acknowledging that the six 
magnificent traits above are only part of being human. But history, as 
well as laboratory experiments in which we are the guinea pigs, reveals 
that most of us have every bit as much ability to be competitive, 
selfish, and even horribly cruel.

So, given those potentials, why are we choosing the traits that are 
getting us, and the rest of life on the planet, in such trouble? And 
what will it take to bring out those six strong traits and use them to 
change where we’re headed?

Here’s where the eco-mind comes to the rescue.

Seeing with an eco-mind means fully appreciating the power of 
context—including conditions we ourselves create—to determine the 
qualities we express. So the question for humanity seems relatively 
straightforward:

Which social rules and norms have proven to bring out the worst in 
humans, and which bring forth the best while protecting us from the worst?

Here’s my take. At least three conditions have been shown over our long 
history to elicit the worst in us:

1. Extreme power inequalities. From historical oppression to today’s 
unprecedented economic disparity.

2. Secrecy, which allows us to evade accountability—as occurred when the 
financial industry, operating without transparency and public oversight, 
brought the global economy to its knees.

3. Scapegoating, where we create “the other” to blame, whether it’s kids 
crying “he did it” on a playground or citizens at a town meeting 
shouting down a congressperson.

We need to reverse those three dangerous trends and, instead, disperse 
power, enhance transparency, and foster mutual accountability.
All three negatives seem to arise with ferocity in cultures premised on 
lack, where continuous rivalry is presumed. Sadly, each has been on the 
rise in the United States for at least three decades. And within our 
culture’s mental map, it all feels inevitable. Our empathy and enjoyment 
in cooperation, our deep sensitivity to fairness, and our need for 
meaning, efficacy, and creativity—all are stifled in societies where 
power is tightly held and opportunities shut off for so many.

For me, it’s no surprise, then, that scholars uncover a “strong 
relationship” between the extent of economic inequality and mental 
illness across countries. This mismatch between the things we know bring 
out the best in us and the cultures we live in helps me understand why 
depression has become a global pandemic.

With an eco-mind we stay focused on the social ecology we ourselves are 
creating that denies us the best in our species’ own nature. Knowing all 
this about ourselves, our challenge seems clear: We need to reverse 
those three dangerous trends and, instead, disperse power, enhance 
transparency, and foster mutual accountability. In the process, we will 
create a culture of alignment with nature in which human needs are met 
in ways that dissolve the presumption of lack.

The key is what I call “Living Democracy,” which consists not only of 
accountable forms of governance but also of a daily practice: a set of 
values—among them inclusion, fairness, and mutual accountability—that 
infuse everything we do in daily life. It is living what Oxford 
physiologist Denis Noble observes about biological systems in his book 
The Music of Life: “There are not privileged components telling the rest 
what to do. There is rather a form of democracy [involving] every 
element at all levels.” The interaction of those components, Noble says, 
creates the shape of life.


Rising Sea Levels:
The View from a Canoe
Decades ago, the legendary journey of the open-ocean canoe Hokule‘a 
revealed secrets of Hawai‘i’s past and sparked pride in native culture. 
Now, a voyage around the world offers a new generation lessons about 
Earth’s uncertain future.
With this understanding, opportunities to be effective appear 
everywhere: We can build citizen movements, replacing “privately held 
government” with elections and governance accountable to citizens. And 
we can rebuild our own mental maps by doing the hard work of actively 
nurturing our own positive proclivities rather than taking them for 
granted. Just one specific example: When students at the University of 
California, Santa Cruz, decided to launch a student-organized 
sustainability course, collaborating with the administration in order to 
green their campus, they realized their success would depend in large 
measure on how well they practiced what I call the “arts of 
democracy”—such people skills as active listening, mediation, 
negotiation, and creative conflict. They got training, stuck with it, 
and their course has spread to other University of California campuses, 
touching the lives of thousands.

With an eco-mind, we know that if we’re all connected, we’re all 
implicated. We look bravely at our nature and realize we don’t have to 
cajole others to be “better.” Whew.

Instead, we can get on with creating social rules and norms proven to 
elicit the best in us—which is plenty. We then have a chance of making 
this century’s planetary turnaround an epic struggle for life so vivid 
and compelling that it satisfies our deep needs for connection, 
fairness, and meaning.

Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article for 9 Strategies to End Corporate 
Rule, the Spring 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is author of the 
legendary best seller Diet for a Small Planet, and many other books. She 
is co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and is a contributing editor 
for YES! Magazine. This article draws on material from her latest book, 
Eco-Mind, Nation Books, 2011.