Escaping Thought Traps and Creating Democracy for a Small Planet

Since Frances Moore Lappé wrote Diet for a Small Planet forty years ago, uncountable people (including the young Steve Jobs) have rethought the impact their meals have on the earth. Lappé has been delving deep ever since, with nearly twenty books and the founding of Food First and the Small Planet Institute. Her latest book is EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Get the World We Want. In it, she defines seven thought traps, and they’ll sound familiar to most of us: over-consumption is the problem, we need to end growth, people hate rules, we’ve lost touch with nature. Lappé declares these all false, and then sets out to defeat them with examples from around the world and her own self-declared “cockeyed possiblism.”

© Frances Moore Lappe