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.

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?

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.

Nature has an incredible capacity for regeneration and growth, but we can't experience it if we stay fearful and focused on lack.

I think of Wangari Mathai in Kenya. If she started out saying she wanted to plant 20 million trees, she would have been laughed at. In fact, the foresters and the government did laugh at her. They said, "Villagers? Un-schooled villagers? Planting trees? No, no, no, it takes foresters." So she planted trees anyway.

[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home.

If we start with "limits" and a premise of scarcity and fear, it makes us fearful of each other, and that makes us vulnerable to anti-democratic systems.