What I'm Reading

“Eco-Mind,” by Frances Moore Lappe, author of “Diet for a Small Planet.”  Just seeing her name takes me back to the 60s. Those of us back then who rejected over-processed food and an overly processed lifestyle were considered by almost everyone to be on the fringe of reality; so, it’s with a certain sense of smugness? that I note that, in the 21^st century, it’s almost normal to demand food grown without pesticides and to try to live with as small a footprint on the earth as possible.

Good for you, Frances, and thank you for all of your work. “Eco-Mind” is a great addition, most especially because it is not the diatribe against Big Bizness and Corrupt Government with a Shame On You chaser that you might expect.

Rather, Lappe, makes a strong and interesting case for the possibility that the environmentalists are suffering from the same cognitive dissonance as the naysayers who believe that technology-driven progress will be our savior.

 “…Lappe dismantles seven widely held messages that undermine our culture’s response to the global environmental and poverty crises. In each case, she challenges their limiting premises – or ‘thought traps’ – and offers instead contrasting ‘thought leaps’ that unleash our hidden power. This internal transformation marks the creation of our eco-mind.”

As a classroom demonstration, I’ve shown a video of the classic experiment by Chabris & Simons¹ in which subjects (or, my students) are asked to watch a short film and to count the number of times a basketball is passed from person to person. During the film, an actor dressed in a gorilla costume walks through the group passing the basketball. When it’s over, subjects are asked how many passes were made, and what did they see in the film? Almost never does anyone notice the gorilla. Once subjects are told about the gorilla, and they re-watch the film, they’re amazed at how they could have missed something that obvious.

This is inattentional blindness, a cognitive phenomenon that demonstrates how our mental frames affect what we see and, subsequently, process.

Lappe explains how our mental frames – on all sides of the environmental issues – determine how we respond to the facts, and she suggests ways to remove our blinders. The takeaway message is that it is not a hopeless situation and that we are already taking steps to solve problems. She explains clearly how to reframe our perception and approach environmental issues constructively.

“We can each make the ‘leaps of mind’ that move us from discouragement to an empowering stance. We can each reframe our thinking and seeing in ways that give us energy to engage.”

¹Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28 (1999): 1059-1074; Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown, 2010).

While our ‘one-rule economy’ in the U.S. creates waste and destruction, Lappe shares fact after fact to demonstrate that human beings around the world are joining forces and moving toward life. In other words, there is hope. It is, however, instructive to look at the influence of how we frame all the information we take in.