A teacher told me this story some time ago: She asked her students to line up in order of how much power they thought they had relative to the others in the class, and they all fought to be last in line. They didn't want to acknowledge that they had personal power.

Fear doesn't have to stop us.

You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money... It's understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system - not scarcity - creates worldwide hunger for millions of people.

I think back to when I was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s, during the [John] McCarthy era, with two parents who founded a Unitarian Church. We lived in a little frame house, and my bedroom was just down the hall from the kitchen. My favorite memories of childhood are of the smell of coffee wafting into my bedroom as my parents and their friends talked about the big, important things - about racism and about how to move our country to live its values.

What has dawned on me is that focusing on the "finite planet" frame sends a message that we have gone as far as Nature can take us and therefore we need to give power to forces outside Nature.

Little wonder that it can seem unthinkable to say "no, thanks" to the modern-day equivalent of our tribe - our fear-driven culture.

That's what happened when my own life crumbled. The people who came into my life bolstered me to take more risks, to be even more true to myself.