With organic approaches, women - who have been gardeners for millennia and mothers forever - can rise because of their intimate knowledge of nature.

The good life is not about avoiding fear. Just the opposite.

Diane Wilson asked, "Why aren't people upset? Why aren't people protesting?" The mayor and county commissioners told her to keep quiet, and everybody else was afraid to speak out against the companies, which included some of the country's biggest chemical companies. There were even attempts on her life. Family members abandoned her, and certainly none of the other shrimpers stood with her.

Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain.

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.

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

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.