admin September 30th, 2007
(Frances) I feel like the T.S. Eliot-kid. “The end of our exploring,” he famously wrote, “will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”
Just as my new book Getting a Grip is hitting bookstores, I’m circling back to where its core ideas first began to take shape in me. Yesterday we fired off the final, final version of a chapter I’ve been working on since last January: World Hunger: Roots & Remedies. It will appear in a sociology text book to be published by Oxford University Press. In it, I journey from my original “ah-ha” moment decades ago: Oh, my God, we humans are actually generating the scarcity we say we fear. With massive feedlots we’ve turned livestock into protein disposals! (Think about it: We produce 13,000 calories a day for every American just in grain; most of it goes to animals.)
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admin September 26th, 2007
(Frances) How many times have I heard progressives I admire, in trying to get a grip on what’s wrong with our world, repeat this claim: The problem is that corporations are legally required to serve only the short-term profit interests of shareholders.
The much-admired film The Corporation says that corporations are legally required to behave like “sociopaths.” (Which evoked a big, approving laugh when I saw the film!)
I strongly disagree. Corporations are each chartered by a state and their charters require directors to serve the interests of the corporation, which is not the same thing as the immediate profit of shareholders. In fact more and more corporations are adding wider purposes to their mission statements.
Alexandra Lajoux of the National Association of Corporate Directors told our staff that “recent thinking is that the duty of the corporation is to the corpaoration as a whole, not just the stockholders but the creditors, the employees, even the communities in which they work, i.e. ‘the whole corporation.’” The crisis of corporate irresponsibility is that, of course, so many corporations are ignoring this broader view of corporate interest an still driven by desire for immediate gain.
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mark September 25th, 2007
(Mark) The hoopla has faded in the weeks since the recent toy recalls. Yet, we’re still searching for a definitive cause.
It looked like Mattel would jump on the blame grenade, officially apologizing for “damaging China’s reputation” after finding that the majority of the recalls were caused by faulty process design. Mattel’s executive v.p. of worldwide operations said, “Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally” (sic?). The scene was clouded by Congressional committee. In this useful recap from The Nation, Lori Wallach of Public Citizen is quoted testifying that the “root cause is U.S. trade policy.” In the same post, Mary Teagarden of the Thunderbird School of Global Management states, “Chinese officials estimate that 50 percent of exported products do not even comply with Chinese laws …. Their system relies on self-regulation and we found that this does not work.”
So, it was the Chinese; no, Mattel; no, US trade policy; no, the Chinese.
Moments like these it’s hard not to cynically say our commercial system is less a market than a mad dash after finite – and ever dwindling – resources and capacities. Starting from the premise of lack, and placing the highest value on return-on-investment, it is difficult to expect corporations to behave differently. Such a frame not only allows, but demands a headlong rush to win a zero-sum game.
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flappe September 21st, 2007
(Frances) A gorgeous New England day and I’m on the train to New York City to speak this afternoon at the Interchurch Center to a gathering of religious leaders. The topic is personal choices and solutions to climate chaos.
Reading the latest on the energy impact of grain-fed meat-centered diets, I feel like I’m 26 again—my jaw dropping in amazement at what I’m learning, just as I was when writing Diet for a Small Planet.
My prep for this talk includes David and Marcia Pimentel’s (Cornell) latest in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. They calculate that it takes around 40 calories of energy to produce one food calorie of beef. (Lamb is even worse at 57 to 1 calories.) They also note that meat-eating Americans down twice the protein recommended by nutritionists. What they don’t point out is that our bodies simply excrete what we can’t use, so all that extra is wasted. Continue Reading »
jess September 19th, 2007
(Jess) There’s an entire chapter in Getting a Grip on the power of the words we use, and I was brought back strongly to it when I read that last Friday, Nebraska state Senator Ernie Chambers filed a lawsuit against God. According to KETV.com, “the lawsuit accuses God ‘of making and continuing to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons, including constituents of Plaintiff who Plaintiff has the duty to represent.’ It says God has caused ‘fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like.’” The suit “seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.”
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flappe September 18th, 2007
(Frances) Yesterday I got to play Leslie Stahl as I interviewed one of my heroes, John Rauh. He heads the bipartisan Just6Dollars campaign that is springing the lock on America’s best kept secret: There is a solution to the crisis of money in politics and it’s already working state-wide in Arizona and Maine (and soon in Connecticut).
It’s call public financing or Clean Elections. It’s simple, doesn’t violate any Supreme Court rulings, and it means that regular citizens can run and win…and they are. And officials no long feel beholden to big contributors. Hey, what a concept!
Part 1 of our film Getting a Grip on Money in Politics will be released October 2. If you are despairing about the state of our democracy, watch this film! Continue Reading »
flappe September 13th, 2007
(Frances) Tomorrow I leave for the International Forum on Globalization’s super-packed teach-in in Washington, D.C. I’m giving a workshop called “the Power of Frame and the Frame of Power”—exploring ideas included in Chapter 4 in Getting a Grip. I would love your ideas.
At the Teach-In I’m also speaking about another core idea in Getting a Grip: How we can shift from a mental frame of scarcity of “goods and goodness” that becomes self-fulfilling, toward a frame of aligning with nature that then allows us to experience plenty. (See The Spiral of Powerlessness and the Spiral of Empowerment.)
Last night I read in two books as prep. One is Jules Pretty’s The Earth Only Endures and the other, the Human Security Report 2005 from the U. of British Columbia.
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admin September 10th, 2007
(Frances) It depends on our getting a grip …
A premise in Getting a Grip is that we humans actually create scarcity from nature’s abundance, and Sunday’s (9.9) New York Times carries a story focusing our minds on just this question: Will we use a plant with amazing potential to enhance abundance or to contribute or our planet’s decline? The West African country of Mali offers a rich example of the choices I’m getting at.
“Mali’s Farmers Discover a Weed’s Potential Power,” proclaims the headline—referring to jatropha (actually a small perennial shrub, not a weed). Many farmers in Mali have long planted it in every 7th row, right along with food crops, because it keeps plant-eating animals away and helps prevent soil erosion. It can grow in very poor soil and with little water.
Now, farmers are learning, it can also produce ten times more agrofuel per acre than corn. Turning jatropha into fuel, a local farmer could Continue Reading »
