Getting a Grip

admin November 19th, 2007

(Frances) We’re just above Nova Scotia, says the flight map on the seat-back facing me, so I’m nearly home after an exhilarating week in England.

An hour ago, I was totally exhausted, but then I started reading the book they handed me as I left last night’s extraordinary 3^rd annual Be the Change gathering in London’s Central Hall, where the response to the message of Getting a Grip moved me deeply.

The book – also titled Be the Change - that’s picked me up on this long flight is simply a collection of the voices of people who’ve spoken at previous “Be the Change” events, each telling their story—from Taddy Blecher, who started a free university in South Africa (simply by inviting poor students to apply and taking it from there!), to Gill Hicks, whose legs were blown off by the London “tube” bomber, and who loves her new life working for the organization PeaceDirect to teach everyday people the skills of peacemaking all over the world.

I am not doing the book justice…just trust me! If you want to start bouncing off your seat, order Be the Change, and whenever you start to slide down, read another of its amazing first-person stories.

Central Hall was super-charged last night. I arrived to deliver the next-to-last speech, just before Vandana Shiva’s. The excitement of the young people in the hall thrilled us both. We we’re both members of the co-sponsoring organization, the World Future Council, earlier in the conference had shared its campaign to spread the reward-renewables model legislation that has proved itself in Germany, moving 12.6% of the country’s electricity to renewal sources in only 7 years!

That morning I’d had enjoyed a three-hour train journey with Vandana from a gathering at Schumacher College in Devon.  She described for me her organization’s stop-the-farmer- suicide campaign in central India.

Vandana and me

I knew that, overall, 150,000 Indian farmers had killed themselves in desperation in the last decade. They’d taken on debt to buy costly seeds and chemicals and were left hopeless when degraded soils and poor harvests left them bankrupt. So imagine the joy I felt when Vandana told me that our Small Planet Fund’s donation to her organization this year had allowed it to work in five hard-hit villages where farmers have now pledged to shed chemical farming and embrace organic farming and seed sharing. These farmers are now celebrating their first harvests with fantastic results, she told me, and in January will hold a Festival of Hope.

Who knows how many other villages will be moved by their example of courage and success?

At last year’s Small Planet Fund gala, Vandana was our honoree. In a few weeks (December 13^th), I can report this story to partygoers at our 6^th annual event. Vandana’s work is exactly what we need to break the spell of corporate-chemical-life-destroying agriculture. Order your tickets now for a totally uplifting evening.

In Totnes, Vandana and I, with about 20 others, had participated in a four-day “think tank” at Schumacher College, asking just what a green-life-serving economy would look like. The photo is from the steps of the dorm where I slept looking down toward the main medieval hall where we met, laughed, and ate sumptuous vegetarian food.

Schumacher College

One of the main ideas I’ve newly learned and want to be sure to include in the next edition of Getting a Grip is that of complementary currencies. Two of the world’s leaders were with us: Margrit Kennedy and Bernard Lietaer. Margrit explained that there are now 33 regional complementary currencies in Germany, each supporting production and purchasing locally and building stronger community ties, more generally. They really work! Here in the U.S., BerkShares is a great success story in Western Massachusetts.

And before these two experiences, I had the great pleasure of giving a lecture helping to launch the new Food Studies Centre at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Harry West, my host, created a rich evening with many great questions. The Centre put me up in a lovely guesthouse across the street from Mecklenburg Square.

Mecklenburg Square

To my great delight, the rowhouse next door wore a plaque near the entry noting that the British social historian R.H. Tawney had lived there. Wow. In my 1989 book, Rediscovering America’s Values, I quote Tawney nine times. His wisdom helps shape Getting a Grip. Consider these words from his Equality in 1952:

“..[D]emocracy is unstable as a political system, as long as it remains a political system and nothing more, instead of becoming… “a type of society” in which “economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant”..is converted into…a “servant of society.”

By the good fortune of lodging next door, I felt I was able finally to pay homage to my mentor.

- Frankie

• Frances