Hope is not what we find in evidence, it's what we become in action.

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

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.

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.

What we see today is a world movement represented by the World Social Forum, involving all sorts of interactions across cultures, not to create some new "ism," but to learn as we walk and to create more democratic forms of social organization that re-embed economic life in community.

On the one hand, our social nature is our greatest beauty - it means that we have natural empathy and sympathy. But our social nature also means that we may let ourselves be controlled by the judgments of others, precisely because we care so much about our status in community.

Every choice we make can be a celebration of the world we want.