Getting a Grip: a video introduction to the book by Frances Moore Lappe
admin September 19th, 2008
Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad is a little book with a big message. Frances Moore Lappe - author of sixteen books, including three-million-copy bestseller Diet for a Small Planet - distills her world-spanning experience and wisdom in a conversational yet hard-hitting style. Getting a Grip is a rare “aha” book that flouts conventional right-versus-left divisions and affirms readers’ basic sanity - their intuition that it is possible to stop grasping at straws and to grasp instead the real roots of today’s crises, from hunger and poverty to climate change and terrorism. Getting a Grip leaves readers feeling liberated and courageous.
Because we are creatures of the mind, says Lappe, it is the power of “frame” - our core assumptions about how the world works - that determines outcomes. She pinpoints the dominant, failing frame now driving our planet toward disaster. Then, with fresh insights, startling facts, and stirring vignettes of ordinary people pursuing creative solutions, Lappe uncovers a new, empowering frame emerging worldwide.
She writes: “My book’s intent is to enable us to see what is happening all around us, but is still invisible to most of us. It is about people in all walks of life who are penetrating the spiral of despair and reversing it with new ideas, ingenious innovation - and courage.”
I agree with Lappe’s concepts completely and disagree with how she has applied them, completely.
I work as an engineering consultant.
When engineers are stuck on a problem, I am sometimes called in to help.
90% of the time that a group of engineers are stuck on a technical problem and I am called in, this is what happens:
I leave the company.
1) I listen to their problem description.
2) I explain what is causing their problem.
3) I explain my plan.
4) We start working on my plan.
5) Someone says, “Well if we can do that, then we could do X.”
6) Some other constraints are then explained to me that were not formerly thought worth disclosing.
7) The employee suggestion is the solution accepted.
9) I send an invoice for my work.
10) I realize that my only value added was to get them to stop looking at the problem the same way.
I recycled all my garbage in 1982 when there was no public recycling.
I built a super insulated solar home in 1982.
I raised my own food in my 10,000 sq ft garden 1982 - 1999.
But when Clinton signed the assault weapons ban in 1994, I stopped giving money to the DNC. I was forced to re examine my fear of nukes.
I realized that I had been thinking with a perceived risk of nuke plants and not a calculated risk.
Then I realized that global warming was a tax and regulate scam, spitting in the face of scientific method.