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Stan Cox

Stan Cox began his career in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is now the Lead Scientist at The Land Institute. Cox is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) and Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine. His writing about the economic and political roots of the global ecological crisis have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, Kansas City Star, Arizona Republic, The New Republic, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Salon, and Dissent, and in local publications spanning 43 U.S. states. In 2012,The Atlantic named Cox their "Readers' Choice Brave Thinker" for his critique of air conditioning. He is based in Salina, Kansas. He is also the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (2020) and the upcoming The Path to a Livable Future: Forging a New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, both from City Lights Books.

Human Miasma

Earth Abuse and the Next Pandemic

By Stan Cox, Resilience.org

Earth abuse is also at the root of the Covid-19 pandemic and the grim likelihood that new pathogens will continue to emerge from other animal species to infect humans.

  • April 20, 2021
air conditioners

The Coronavirus-Climate-Air Conditioning Nexus

By Stan Cox, Resilience.org

The severe heat is driving almost all social gatherings and group activities into enclosed, air-conditioned spaces. Getting together these days in the cool indoor world can dramatically raise the risk of coronavirus infection.

  • July 21, 2020
book cover

Going on an Energy Diet

By Stan Cox, Resilience.org

If fossil fuels are rapidly eliminated during the transition to non-fossil energy, the pool of energy available to society will shrink. How much it shrinks will depend on how fast the new energy capacity and a new electric grid can be developed.

  • July 20, 2020
Cattle feedlot

It’s Not Just Meat: All Farm and Food Workers Are in Peril

By Stan Cox, Resilience.org

Now is the time to build a new, more humane, more robust food system on the ruins of the one that has failed us. This nation can have an ample, nutritious food supply without exploiting and endangering the people who produce and process it.

  • June 30, 2020
book cover

Fair Enough

By Stan Cox, Resilience.org

This book is focused primarily on domestic climate policy, because neither we as individuals nor our government can, with a straight face, presume to advise the wider world on climate issues unless we ourselves have at least started the journey toward life within ecological boundaries.

  • May 4, 2020
WWII Rationing in US

Fair-shares Rationing can Cure Today’s Food Shortages

By Stan Cox, Ezra Silk, Houston Chronicle

In times of real or imagined scarcity, when the market’s invisible hand pushes us to put our own interests above those of others, fair-shares rationing can foster cooperative problem-solving, mutual aid and a sense of common purpose — exactly what we’re going to need in the frightening months that lie ahead.

  • April 24, 2020
rooftop solar

Peer Pressure? Too Little and Way Too Late for the Climate Emergency

By Stan Cox, Resilience.org

In a Washington Post opinion piece last month, Robert Frank sought to instruct us in how peer pressure can “help stop climate change.” He wasn’t very convincing on that point; he did help, however, to inadvertently make the case that collective efforts, ones much more sweeping than individual role-modeling, are necessary to staving off climate catastrophe.

  • March 9, 2020
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