Frances Moore Lappé: Some "thought traps" can feel like no-brainers, like "We've hit the limits," or, "Since growth is killing our planet, we must adopt no-growth economies." I call them traps because they can defeat us by evoking fear, when psychologists tell us that fear actually makes most people more materialistic and self-centered. Just as troubling, they bless what we're doing now with a term - growth - most of us experience as positive. Don't we want our children, our plants and our love to grow? And the opposite of "growing" is shriveling and dying - not very appealing.
These frames don't help people see that our economy is really more about waste and destruction than growth. Scientists report that from 55 to 87 percent of energy in the US is wasted. Roughly 40 percent of the food in the US is wasted, and that's before counting the scary reality that 40 percent of what the US eats is empty calories.
Plus, frames of "growth vs. no growth" and "We've hit the limits" keep us in a quantitative mindset: Our problem is just too much. This diagnosis doesn't get us asking why. We just assume we know - it's those selfish little shoppers multiplying worldwide. But once we shift from quantities, with an eco-mind, we start to see the relationships that generate waste and destruction from plenty.
And we get curious: Why would our bright species actually create scarcity? That takes us right to the center of the dominant mental map: lack. I call it the ScarcityMind because it presumes lack of just about everything - lack of goods and goodness. From there, we distrust ourselves and feel we have to give over our power to those "up there" and to a magical market that works on its own without us.
No comments:
Post a Comment