Hope is a stance, not an assessment.

I learned this [ that fear doesn't have to stop me] when my world came apart. I was living a life-long dream of a family life combined with an organization to promote living democracy - all on a gorgeous 45-acre compound in rural Vermont. I'd spent a decade building my dream, and then it started to crumble, piece by piece - my marriage, my organization, my confidence.

Making conscious choices about what we eat, based on what the earth can sustain and what our bodies need, can help remind us that our whole society must begin to balance sustainable production with human need.

Engagement is the good life. What could be more exciting than getting involved in something that you care about and joining with others and seeing something change? What could be more thrilling?

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

Recently, [Diana Wilson] went on a hunger strike to protest Dow Chemical's refusal to accept responsibility for a 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, caused by a company they now own, Union Carbide. In the past, Diane's hunger strikes had been lonely affairs, but this time friends and co-conspirators from around the country took turns joining her on her flatbed truck under the hot Texas sun, greeting Dow workers as they entered the plant.

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."