Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet
- ISBN13: 9781585422371
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Hope's Edge follows the author of the classic Diet for a Small Planet and her daughter as they travel the world, discovering practical visionaries who are making a difference in world hunger, sometimes one village at a time.
Thirty years ago, Frances Moore Lappé started a revolution in the way Americans think about food and hunger. Now Frances and her daughter, Anna, pick up where Diet for a Small Planet left off. Together they set out on an around-the-w... More >>
Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet
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This is a very interesting book. It features in one part a detailed description of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, who used microloans to help Bangladeshis, especially women, get out of poverty and earn for themselves. By issuing very small loans, the people of Bangladesh are able to build their businesses or working conditions and change their lives. I recommend this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
Many authors can and have articulated the problems of today’s society. It is important for those problems to be exposed and explained – but where does that leave us? As someone all too familiar with the problems, and struggling to live with my ideals in today’s America, it is easy to feel like there is no hope and the world’s people are just accepting their fate at the hands of the multi-nationals. That’s when a book like Hope’s Edge begins to reveal its meaning and importance: it not only covers the problems, more importantly, it uncovers stories of people who are overcoming the problems.
The book arms us with examples of people and strategies that are working, that are making progress. It didn’t leave me feeling like we’re all doomed no matter what we do, it didn’t leave me feeling that I can sit back and relax because someone else is making things ok, it simply gave and gives me hope, examples and evidence that it is possible to create healthy communities and empower people in the face of fear, oppression and poverty. That is the seed of true power, the knowing it is possible. For that I thank Ms. Lappé and her daughter and highly recommend their book.
Rating: 5 / 5
READ THIS BOOK! Since the first Diet for a Small Planet came out in the 1970’s, I’ve had a profound change in my thinking about planetary health. I read once about how much the bio-waste of dinosaurs affected the atmosphere of the early planet- decaying flesh, methane emissions, pushing the planet into global warming. Frances Moore Lappe informed me that not only is the methane associated with our meat industry a problem, the interrelated costs to the environment of the feed industry- nitrogen, fuel emissions, methane, etc- are enough to tip the scale to disaster by themselves. I just read a story- just this second- 12/17/08- on the Discovery Channel website, about the meat industry nitrogen effluent (7 million tons per year) causing a dead zone presently the size of Massachussetts in the water of the Gulf of Mexico, and it is expected that without help, it will eventually kill the Gulf like the Dead Sea. Well, Ms. Lappe has been talking about this stuff for thirty years. I used to think she was a shrill Chicken Little. No more. There are too many people for us to blindly do what ever we please. As a group, we’ve got to institute controls. READ THIS BOOK!
Rating: 5 / 5
The “hopelessly hopeful” reviewer seemed to have missed the Lappe’s whole message, or maybe intentionally didn’t see it. I loved HOPE’S EDGE and the Lappe’s point that hope doesn’t come from stacking up evidence but it comes, as they say, from taking action. Through their stories of big and small social change, from school gardens in Berkeley to our personal choices about food to the largest social movement in Brazil, the Lappe’s help all of us see we each have a role in helping our planet evolve. Thank you to the Lappe’s for giving us such a hope-with-an-edge message at a time when so many of us are feeling desperate.
Rating: 5 / 5
*There is a profound disconnect between the direction our planet is headed and our own deepest sensibilities.
*Why have we, as societies, created that which as individuals we abhor?
*None of use would chose to let a child die of hunger or preventable disease, but 32,000 children die everyday in our world.
*No one would intentionally destroy many of our living species, and yet tens of thousands fall every year now. It would take 10 million years to recover them all.
*No one would want to poke a hole in the ozone, and yet there is now one the size of a continent, causing cancer and deaths to soar.
*No one would want to create a greenhouse effect, disrupting the natural system in ways we are only beginning to understand, and yet our fossil-fuel industrial model, as well as our cattle ranching model, are doing just this.
*No one would consciously design a world community in which a few hundred individuals controlled as much wealth as half the world�s population, and where 1 percent end up with more than do the bottom 95 percent, and yet this is the world we live in.
*In other words, how it could be that we humans are creating a world that at the deepest level we can�t recognize as ours? A world of mega-cities with unbreathable air, of sterile strip malls, of beggars and billionaires? A world that we have to shut out because the pain of seeing it is too great?
Grappling with the global crisis can be daunting, but in this book Lappe (and little Lappe) have here clarified the crisis, highlighted the �thought traps� that keep us locked into this deadly mode, and provided a new �mental map� of how we can revitalize ourselves and the planet. . This book is a global tour de force, skipping from continent to continent, community to community, in search of Hope. And the good news is, they found it. This book details numerous examples from all over the world where hope and genuine democracy are literally springing up from the ground. As clichéd as it might sound, Hope is very much alive. This book is a celebration of food and people and the communities that bind them. For the sake of life itself, everyone should read this. Re-discover the world, yourself, and the food that sustains us.
Rating: 5 / 5