Unexpected success! Toward critical mass…
By Dr. Will Tuttle
The last two days have been an uplifting and heartening experience for me.
Working to bring the vegan message of compassion to our culture has been like climbing a huge and daunting mountain. For many years I toiled, collecting information, reflecting, and sharing. Then I decided to write a comprehensive book and undertook writing The World Peace Diet, which took another five years of full-time, nearly continuous labor. Since then has been another four years of scheduling an unending speaking tour, living on the road, putting on over 150 events annually in order to help move the message of The World Peace Diet into whatever receptive communities I could find in our culture. Then about 8 months ago, I decided to fashion a campaign that would hopefully catapult The World Peace Diet into the mainstream. Its message is so intensely transformational that I knew I’d have to rely upon the vegan communities to be successful in the endeavor.
For years and years I worked and worked and worked and worked.
The mountain so enormous, all I could do was just keep putting one foot in front of another, and never stop. My spouse Madeleine was an angel, and so were huge numbers of beautiful friends and colleagues who have provided support. But it always felt basically like a huge, unending labor.
Then yesterday, I watched as the campaign came to fruition and The World Peace Diet started climbing on Amazon – from number 25,352 to number 8,228 to number 2,452 to 389 to 68 to 24 to 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, all the way to number 5, just above Karl Rove’s book! #1 in Ethics & Morality, #1 in Healthy Living. Eventually, on Sunday, March 14th, The World Peace Diet climbed all the way to the top, reaching #1 as the best-selling book worldwide.
And as I watched the book climb the charts the last 2 days, I felt for the first time in many years that I was being carried. I was doing nothing, and literally thousands of dedicated and caring vegan activists and vision-holders were lifting me up, and not just lifting me up, but lifting up our entire culture at the same time.
As I write this, The World Peace Diet has been in the Amazon top ten for 2 straight days now — this is nothing short of a miracle. It has received no support from Oprah, Ellen, the Today Show, or Glenn Beck. It has been completely due to the cooperation of the many and diverse branches of the vegan, vegetarian, animal rights, health, raw food, macrobiotic, peace, green, yoga, and progressive spiritual communities, and many more beyond this.
This is a shining example of how we can all come together, forget our differences, and work together for a common soul-stirring cause: to transform our culture so that we can create a world where peace, radiant health, and sustainability are actually possible. One long-time vegan organizer just wrote to me:
“I am really impressed how the vegan community came together and coalesced on this promotion. I have not seen this community collaborate or cooperate on this scale in all my years of being a vegetarian and vegan. If we can keep this enthusiasm alive I really have hope that we can make some significant & timely progress in promoting a plant-based lifestyle in the upcoming years.”
I want to thank from my heart the countless kind and concerned people who have worked and participated in this uplifting campaign. We have literally worked a miracle, and it’s not over yet!
If you are able to participate, you are warmly invited to do so!
All of the proceeds from this campaign are being donated to grass-roots vegan education.
Peace and blessings to all. The power of love is ultimately unstoppable.