This blog post below was posted in 2022 after moving to Virginia to be closer to my family. It is a short essay but contains the key sources on my own exploration of this question: How much is enough? Inspired by the great ethicists of my formative adult years, these writers were each examining what Albert Schweitzer called an ethical basis for life. I encourage you to read the post for its links to sources and collective direction these great thinkers still offer Americans and people everywhere on how to live together in peace and prosperity.
Diet for a Small Planet arrived like a rolling earthquake in sunny California in 1971.
50th Anniversary Edition
In 1971 (when I first read Diet for a Small Planet), Frances Moore Lappe’s research brought to light the nature of capitalism in creating hunger and poverty. I recall her riveting question then, and just how relevant it remains today:
How much is enough?
Frances Moore Lappe
Instead of the world not producing enough food to feed everyone, she demonstrated how we produce enough food to feed everyone and that remains true today. Then why hunger? Unregulated capitalism and concentration of wealth to a few people and companies causes many problems including hunger. Access to nutritious food remains an issue of human rights. In the introductory remarks to the 5th edition, Frances doesn’t hold back on the perilous point in history in which we are poised. She titles it: Our Choice, Our Promise. Ever positive, Lappe shows us how most of our current ills are a question of democracy.
What is Democracy Anyway? For me, at the heart of democracy are the rules and norms for living together that meet our deepest needs–bringing forth the best in our species while keeping our destructive capacities in check.
Introductory Remarks, Diet for a Small Planet, 50th Edition, xx1.
Frances centers her work in food justice within democratic norms. She describes humanity’s greatest needs: personal power (voice), meaning (our lives matter), and community.
No one understands the problem of hunger and its solutions better than Frances. I highly recommend her book, Diet for a Small Planet. See also 22 other books Lappe has published at this link.
In the 1970s Frances Moore Lappe asked, “How much is enough?” Still actively writing, speaking and advocating for food justice, she remains one of my guides to living a sane life in The Land of Plenty for Some.
Other early and ever present guides to my adult life and what would preoccupy my work and art, Thomas Berry, Albert Schweitzer, Rachel Carson and E.F. Schumacher all addressed the same issue from different points of view: living in right relationship with all life and a sustaining Earth ecosystem.
In 2008 I published the first of my writing, Paean to the Earth, which included a little essay titled: Get A Grip Ecology. It included 5 principles by which stable ecosystems operate:
Utilizes a renewable energy source/ Does not overgraze food capacity/ Recycles essential elements/Preserves biodiversity/Moderates population size.
Lappe showed us we strayed from these principles when she demonstrated that there has always been enough food to feed every person in the world a nutritious diet, i.e. food scarcity is a myth. By harnessing the major grain crops for growing beef, pork and chicken, Americans were eating there own seed corn and that of other nations. Lappe first introduced Americans to eating low on the food chain by adopting a mostly plant diet. She systematically demonstrated that hunger exists only from misuse of the world’s resources that could easily feed everyone well.
E.F. Schumacher in his landmark book, Small Is Beautiful, examined the physics and economics of business systems and showed that maximum efficiency and employee satisfaction occurs in companies of 500 employees or less. He first wrote about “technology with a human face.” Today, so many decades down the road of human ingenuity run amuck, industrialized societies are looking around and asking how we recover our humanity while making a living.
Again, we must ask ourselves Lappe’s question: “How much is enough?”
Thomas Berry and Albert Schweitzer focused on the spiritual and moral dimensions of how we relate to each other and the Earth community. Berry took us on a rich journey to learn the traditions of cultures based on eco-principles and proposed that our hope resides in adopting similar values and practices. Schweitzer arrived at an “ethical basis for living” through thought: My will to live exists equally in every living thing and thus the path to a moral life is to live in concert with all other beings whether human or tree or four-legged.
These are the principles of the planet and our greatest thinkers came to them from varying paths but these principles have proven true from all perspectives.
This is just a reminder that the answers to the climate crisis and our social ills are embedded in the very same laws that govern the planet and every living creature on it.
My daughter on a recent hike with me along the Eastern Shore. We are best when we are in nature together. It restores our humanity and our hope.
Susan Feathers 