We are very much social creatures who model ourselves on one another.

I was a compulsive eater in my late teens and until I wrote Diet for a Small Planet, so I know what it feels like when food becomes a threat.

How we frame the world - how we talk about it and define it - affects how we see things and how we live.

[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home.

Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities.

Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.

I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."