What was so moving for [Diane Wilson], and also for me, is that she felt the Bay itself was like her grandmother. She said, "I don't think there's a woman alive who would give up fighting for her child, or her mother, or her grandmother."

I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-woo l possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant.

What we do in the book my daughter Anna and I wrote, Hope's Edge, is to give people a glimpse of food as a source of nourishment, health, and community, rather than a threat. That means reconnecting with food as it comes from the Earth and with those who produce food.

When we say we have "hit the limits," we are saying that nature is the problem, when in fact the limits we have hit are the limits of destruction and waste, not nature.

If we cannot know what's possible, then we are free to do that which is pulling our hearts and that which is life serving.

What is different and exciting is how much we have learned. We learned we were right that we don't need the chemical model of agriculture. We know so much more about the life of soil now and we understand how plants synergistically work together with microbes and animals to create healthy conditions.

The problem is that our whole tribe - if you will, the larger community of humanity itself - is on a death march ecologically and in terms of the intensification of violence and conflict.