by Tom Braford
I recently read a book with a pretty depressing title that tells the sordid history of our country and the prominent role my adopted city, St Louis, has played in that history. There were early hints of a possible upside of living and working at the epicenter of repeated attempts at redemption by courageous people, many of whom I know, and the actions they have taken in familiar places throughout our city. I thought, this can’t be how the story ends.
In 1970, Francis Moore Lappe published the seminal best seller, Diet for a Small Planet, which transformed how we think about food. Forty years later she wrote EcoMind, which forever changes our understanding of the roots of our environmental / climate and poverty / race relations crises.
Ten years later, however, we have not remade our mental map; in fact, we have doubled down on our belief in scarcity while continuing to make each other and our ways of doing things wrong. Instead, what if everyone, no matter how radical or reactionary their viewpoint, has a piece of the truth?
Lappe says it’s our minds, and I would add our hearts, that need to change, not the world. As the Beatles said, you say you want a revolution? We all want to change the world. Why don’t we change our hearts and minds instead?
Maybe it’s our poverty consciousness that limits growth and prosperity for all, not a scarcity of resources or the capacity of human ingenuity. Can we put our hearts and minds together to make things go further by growing the pie and distributing the pieces more equitably?
If we come from a mindset of abundance and efficient sharing of resources, we can learn from the growing success of community based, worker-owned cooperative development, the worker-owned union co-op movement and the cohousing, mutual housing and coliving movements.
It’s all happening at Arizmendi Ecovillage, so if any of this sounds interesting to you, contact us to find out how you can plug into the movement to Heal the Broken Heart of America.
Contact us at:
braford@sbcglobal.net
www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com