Spirit in Action

Fair Share of Sustainable Carbon, Water & Bread - Any Way You Slice It

Stan Cox is author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing and a Senior Research Scientist and coordinator of research for the The Land Institute. With an eye to a just & sustainable future, Stan explores our history with rationing and the possibilities for an equitable future of necessary constraints.

Stan Cox is also author of Losing Our Cool

Broadcast on:: 22 Sep 2013
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sync deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today for Spirit in Action, I'm pleased to welcome Stan Cox, Plant breeder with the Land Institute in Selena, Kansas And author of a couple books, including his new one, Any way you slice it, the past, present, and future of rationing. With an eye to the limits of our planet, in terms of energy, food, water, and health care, Stan explores what we've done and what we could do to prevent war and hardship To find ways into the inevitable future with justice and well-being To do this means that Stan leads us to look squarely at how we've handled rationing In the USA and around the world, successfully, or in failure None of us wants the limits that are surely coming and are already here for many around the globe But keeping our eyes closed will promise suffering and injustice and likely death for many Before we talk to Stan, I want to note that support for this show comes from A Claire, Wisconsin attorney, Catherine B. Scholz, a believer in honesty, accuracy, and world healing work Proud to support the work of Northern Spirit Radio Her world healing work includes helping her clients get a new start on their finances By guiding them through bankruptcy when needed You can call Catherine B. Scholz at 715-835-8904 Right now, our guest, Stan Cox, author of "Any Way You Slice It" The past, present, and future of rationing joins us by phone from Selena, Kansas Stan, welcome to "Spirit In Action" It's great to be with you If you weren't talking to me on the phone, what would you be doing? You're a plant breeder, right? That's right Yeah, my day job is plant breeding, so I would probably be out now taking notes on my sorghum populations And give me an idea what plant breeding is, especially in the day of genetic manipulation Yeah, there's a lot of confusion about plant breeding these days because there are a whole lot of techniques that are being used to try to manipulate the genomes of plants that are not really the kind of things that have produced The myriad varieties of crop plants that we have today, that process started 10,000 years ago With the domestication of wild plants, and then farmers in later years, professional plant breeders Have developed this great diversity of plants we have now Mainly by inter-pollinating or allowing plants to pollinate each other Producing large populations and then picking the best plants among them And so that cycle of pollination and selection brought us up to almost the present day But in the meantime, over the past couple of decades, we've had transgenic technology moving genes from one species into another Without pollination, but simply by literally shooting them into another species And so that is in the scheme of plant breeding, it's really kind of a fringe activity That has only produced a small handful of highly profitable genes that can be put into crop plants But still the foundation of what we deal with are crop varieties that have been developed by the old-fashioned Go to the field and select methods You don't tend to patent things, I think, that are done by breeding the genetic manipulation That's when they want to patent a gene How do you think about this? Is this a good idea, a bad idea, just an overall guess? I mean, the main thing we want to talk about is your book, anyway, you slice it about rationing But I think that this plays a part in your overview Yeah, exactly. In your right, the main purpose of transgenic technology And some of the newer technologies that are coming after that Is to have kind of a landing pad in a crop plant that makes it easier to patent and control Not only the gene that was inserted, but all the genes in the plant And any advantage to the farmer is simply a byproduct of that The US patent office has, in the past, issued patents on non-transgenic plants as well But generally, the way intellectual property and plants is handled And it is that DNA within the plant is information and it's treated often by not only companies But universities as their intellectual property That's generally been handled through free exchange of germplasm Nobody trying to claim ownership over that intellectual property because soybean or sorghum variety Is simply a conduit for genes that not only existed before professional plant breeding But existed even before agriculture And we have mechanisms for making it possible to have ownership of a very specific variety of one of those crops But not over the genes or the pollen or eggs produced by those varieties That will produce the next generation of crops I'm not sure I still have quite your view on it Are you at all scared about the transgenic production of our future crops? Is that a concern for you or is that just something that will just, you know, it will become part of the mix? No big deal? Well, here's the thing about transgenic crops, the concerns about them fall into different categories That tend to get mixed up and sometimes we worry more about the less problematic things And don't worry enough about the more problematic And I think what we talked about so far, the use of transgenic technology to lay property claims on crop plants Is the most serious and that's what really causes most of the problem Is tying up the gene pool through transgenic technology and patenting There are other concerns that include ecological concerns That we're putting genes out into the wild that weren't there before And disrupting insect populations or plant populations Or creating superweeds and various things And that's a serious concern also But most of the press and good transgenic varieties get concerns the safety of the food that's produced by them And that's where there's the least, there's a little bit, but there's the least firm evidence that they're going to do harm And so I worry much less about the fact that something I buy at the supermarket is going to contain some extract of transgenic soybeans I worry much less about my stomach with that than I do about the fate of American agriculture And what that's doing economically Well, let's get to your book here Any way you slice it, the past, present and future of rationing I think rationing is kind of a distant, evil concept to most people I don't know if you agree about that, but most people don't want to think or talk about rationing It happened during World War II, we don't really have to concern ourselves with it Why did you get involved in and why are you concerned that we should do a good job of preparing on how to do rationing? Well, you're right that rationing has a lot of bad associations today And part of the reason for that is that it's used as kind of an all-purpose scare word And I noticed that in, say, the dates over healthcare over the past few years Both sides actually tend to say, well, if the other side gets their way and we either do or don't have universal healthcare The result is going to be rationing and that's going to be the end of the world People who don't want to see an organization who don't want to see anything done about carbon emissions And climate change will claim that if we try to do something about it, we're going to have rationing of energy So that the word which had much more neutral connotations back 60 years ago Has come back today to mean some vaguely defined thing that's really scary And so part of the reason the book was to try to demystify this whole idea of rationing To say that we already do a lot of rationing in our economy in often extremely unfair ways And that if we really do try to get a grip on our overall resource consumption And try to limit that to ecologically sustainable level That some kind of rationing is inevitable And that if we work at it, we can develop systems of rationing that are very fair And provide sufficiency for everybody and if we don't we'll have types of rationing that are really unfair and harmful A lot of people I think will be a bit stunned to realize how much rationing does go on I mean you talk about it in a number of domains I mean you talk historically what happened during World War I and World War II What happened in the 1970s, the energy embargo and what that led to in terms of rationing of energy or gasoline specifically in this country But you also talk about things like food controls, there's limitations on that You go over to Egypt and India and Cuba and you talk about how shortages limitations affect that You talk about carbon and the many ways that that is proposed to or perhaps is controlled a bit Birth control, that was an amazing one to think of as a case of rationing but the one child policy in China Water rationing, which is kind of the up and coming thing I imagine And then the one that you've already mentioned, health care Most people didn't think of it as rationing but of course the excitement, the fur I guess I'd say About death panels, whether the new policy was going to bring death panels as opposed to the death panels As opposed to the death panels that we have from the insurance companies right now All of those are different facets and I hadn't nearly begun to scratch the surface on how this controls our lives And we'll make our future better or worse If you had to be an optimist, which I'm not sure you are, either being from Georgia or living in Kansas But if you had to be an optimist, what would be the optimistic future that we'd have with respect to rationing? Well, in the book, you alluded to, I went in more detail into four broad categories of commodities that we ration or have rationed Which were energy, food, water, and medical care When we look into the future about what we'll be called upon to do to share those commodities fairly They're varying levels of optimism I think we've already shown in many places and repeatedly over time that when water gets short That we can devise systems to make sure that everybody gets what they need but not use too much So water is the most important thing that we need every single day And it's quite easy to identify and keep track of and so forth And so even though there have been a lot of conflicts over water and people have been treated very unfairly with regard to water We kind of know how to deal with it But as we go into the future, it's not only water, in fact it's related to water The fact that we're going to have more and more shortages of food And we also have examples of how to deal with the fact that people cannot, in many places where you have a lot of inequality People can't afford to pay the price for food that would be required to keep farmers in business So you've got a gap between what it costs farmers to produce food and what people can afford to pay for it And the government has to step in and bridge that gap by subsidizing food And then taking that pool of subsidized food and having a fair way to ration it And so that's what I was looking at in India and Egypt In that area too, I'm pretty optimistic, even though those systems have often been corrupted and bungled At least we know what we're doing The idea of rationing energy or carbon emissions is something that has been done in wartime and in emergencies like the 1970s But there are only a few analysts and thinkers who have tried to foresee those kind of systems in the future So that we put a very firm cap on the quantity of fossil fuel emissions that we're going to produce as a society And then given that, what is each person or each business or each government agency's fair share of emissions So that you have a permit basically to burn a certain amount of fuel or create a certain amount of emissions And it's not something you can trade away or buy more of, that's your share And that share may decrease over time, how are we going to live with that? That's an idea that is very strange to people, it's been, there have been some fairly detailed plans for doing it Either with or without trading of the permits and mainly developed by folks in Great Britain But in general it sounds very alien, but I think that in the end that's what's going to be needed And it actually has better prospects I believe than other suggestions such as carbon tax We've just seen how inflammable the idea of carbon tax is in causing such political turmoil in Australia Which has one, but they won't have it for long now because this change in government there It's been extremely unpopular thing And history shows I believe that if you try to use price to limit the consumption Then you do have a lot of political problems Whereas in the past when it was clearly necessary that we have rationing on a fair share's basis There was more of a spirit of burden sharing and common purpose and so forth And even though people would complain about the details, there was generally a spirit of working together You mentioned one thing that I think won't occur to people, in the book you refer regularly to non-price rationing And there's rationing by price, I mean you can limit how much people consume by jacking the price up So that some people can't afford it That's been generally considered to be the good thing for us to do in the United States, you know, a free economy Politically, is that more saleable to people? I mean they'll buy that idea because that's the good old capitalist system at work Well, yeah, economists like all of us tend to use language and words in different ways at different times And the word rationing is used and you can find it in textbooks and scholarly papers by economists To mean, as you said, any means by which it's decided how much of which goods go to different people or different actors in the economy So that can include either letting supply and demand and price decide that or some more formal mechanism that gets around the use of price But then you'll also hear economists talk about rationing as strictly as what happens when price is not the determining factor So that's why in the book I had to often emphasize when I was talking about non-price rationing to say so Economists in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s often address non-price rationing in a serious way Whereas today that's just something that's a bad thing that happens if the market doesn't work right What they showed in theory and I think it was born out in practice is that the greater the degree of inequality in a society and the more severe the limitation on availability of something that the more unfair price rationing is And the more necessary non-price rationing is if people are going to get the quantities that they need of basic necessities Now if you're talking about houses on the Riviera or rare wines or something then it's probably okay to let price determine who gets those And that's one reason I chose food, water, energy and medical care The quick when you get into those kind of goods then if you have the combination of the limitation on the supply and a highly unequal society or economy The more it's necessary to get away from rationing.price and have a different system Most of us I think consider the rationing that happened during World War II to be a successful case of rationing That is to say you know I really did their victory gardens and people limited And in fact people who violated the laws on rationing they got prosecuted including some pretty high profile folks Is it your sense that people look back on that rationing and still say it was a good thing back then? Yeah I think the most interesting thing to me is the contrast between World War II era on one hand and on the other hand either World War I or the 1970s in this country Because in World War I the US wasn't involved in that war for very long but we were sending a lot of food and fuel to Europe before and after the war during it And the government at that time decided that whatever happened there was not going to be any rationing And there were a lot of problems with shortages and social unrest and despite calls for voluntary restraint And there was something for food conservation called the Hoover pledge Herbert Hoover who would later be president was sort of a food czar at that time But those voluntary programs didn't work because especially people with modest income were saying that's fine for rich people to make a big show of cutting back But we already don't have enough, there isn't any weight for us to cut back So there was a lot of strife and that was starting at the beginning of World War II when we were just coming out of the depression So there was a lot of economic stress already That same kind of thing was starting to happen and the government quickly realized that simply asking people to cut back voluntarily would not work And that instead to guarantee everyone access to a certain quantity of the basic necessities And to make sure that nobody got more than their share would create much more of a good spirit which it did Now that's not to say there wasn't cheating and there were a lot of famous or infamous stories about black markets and so forth But that was a very small, it remained a small part of the economy And it was very sort of nickel and dime type stuff, probably almost everybody engaged in a little bit of bath now But real serious hoarders or cattle rustlers or all the big time cheaters were looked down on And when public officials bought gas under the table or in one case cheese under the table They were publicly humiliated for doing it because people really liked the idea that everybody was playing about the same rules Can you give an example of, you mentioned a couple in the book, high visibility politicians and other folks who got really severely slapped for breaking the rules I mean I think some of us listening would want to cheer, it's like okay, the common folks were pulling our share of the load and these people are thinking they're above the law Why don't you give an example, you mentioned from the book? There was the case of the governor of Maryland and the first lady engaged in what was called pleasure driving at the time And I believe it involved a trip to Florida or something and so they lost their gas ration for some period of time, they were not allowed to buy gasoline There was a ring of what turned into paper socialites in Detroit including a high official with the Packard Motor Company who were found to have been buying in excess of their quote of some goods including cheese And so this weren't multi-million dollar deals, this was simply doing things that other people weren't allowed to do and so they were punished as well And they were all kind of high society people and I believe it was a sheriff in Pennsylvania who got caught making Sunday trips and paid the price for that So people, when they saw this kind of thing in the papers they realized that the system really was treating everybody the same You know I do wonder if our country has changed our sense of entitlement to things such that no one can tell me not to go driving in my car You know what I'm saying, this kind of thought of entitlement we can despoil the world including the natural world as much as we wish How dare you tell me that I can't throw my plastic or whatever into the wild, you know what I'm saying, I think we're very different people than we were during World War II in terms of these ethics Calling it the American dream but the American dream has gotten really obese I think at this point Does that from your point of view decrease the likelihood that people are going to be able to accept what we need to do to preserve our world? Yet I quoted environmental scholar David Orr in the book who said that sometime after World War II we had a collision with affluence and it changed us as a people our entire character And I don't know if I agree completely with that I think certainly that as long as we have the illusion of abundance that it is going to be hard to convince people that we have to cut back And here's where I have to emphasize that when I'm talking about rationing I'm not talking about it as a tool to be used in the first instance to try to reduce society's total consumption By first limiting each individual on how much they can consume because I think that is not going to be effective however well the first thing that will need to be done and it'll be even harder than putting in a system of rationing Will be to put a ceiling on to take one example of a ceiling on fossil fuel consumption overall say in an entire country and to say this is our fossil fuel budget and the fuels can be allocated by how much emissions they create But this is our emissions or fuel budget for the year and it's going to be lower next year and lower the year after that and now we have to figure out how to live under that and that will do two things it will spark a lot of much more serious work on efficiency and conservation Because now it's not an optional thing it's something if we want to have what we need we're going to have to be efficient and conserve but it will also trigger the need for fair shares of allocating what there is available to go around Because when you have this strict limit on the supply then if you just let price determine then inflation is going to take off and this is what has always happened in war time during World War II that's one reason the main reason we needed rationing you have a limit on supply the price immediately skyrockets so then the government put price controls on goods but then when the price was controlled and the supply was still restricted then you had shortages importing and a lot of potential chaos that required then having a rationing so by the time people go through all of that the limitation on the overall supply and the threat of not being able to get what they need because of inflation and shortages rationing at that point looks like a very positive thing and people welcome it During the 70s with the oil embargo and severe energy shortages there were calls from all over the political spectrum for rationing George F. Will the conservative columnist was saying well I don't like the idea of rationing but it's certainly better than people having fistfights at gas stations so once you're in the situation rationing looks much better than it does when you're talking about it in theory I have the feeling that you're surrounded by abundance we're visiting today with Stan Cox he's author of a new book anyways slice at the past present and future of rationing he's also author of losing our cool and he's our guest today for spirit and action I'm your host Mark helps me for this Norton spirit radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org on that site you can listen to more than eight years of our programs you can listen to and download them find further information about and links to our guests for instance you'll find how to contact Stan Cox on the site he's readily available at sliceit.org plus you can post comments on our site we just love that two way communication and you can click on the donate button because you know we're depending on you to make this program happen some help making this program possible came from Catherine B. Schultz an Eau Claire Wisconsin attorney who helps clients restart their finances when needed by guiding them through bankruptcy Catherine is a believer in honesty accuracy and world healing work and she's proud to support the work of Norton spirit radio you can call Catherine B. Schultz at 715-835-8904 but first and foremost remember to support the great work of your local community radio station which brings you a slice of news and music available nowhere else help them with your time and with your money again we're speaking with Stan Cox the book any way you slice it and you've been talking Stan about a lot of the ways in which rationing either has or hasn't worked and from what you said it sounds like that when the need is there and it's apparent that people buy into and support rationing efforts as long as the program seemed to be fairly sharing the work and the privations of the rationing are you saying also that that looks likely in the current political gridlock in the USA because I think that politically it does not look obvious to me right now that there are numerous cases of unfair sharing of burdens which our government seems to be lacking either the clarity or the willpower to correct it looks to me like fairness is less of a driving force than it perhaps was in the past which has led us to shirk our responsibilities for instance to the rest of the species on the planet in terms of environmental or CO2 emissions etc even the passage of the accountable care act came right down to the wire and I don't have the sense that it was fairness or the well being of people in general that was much of a guiding principle so do you think in light of the current developments that fair share will be much of a guiding principle to our government's decisions about rationing? Well I think we owe a debt to the occupy movements of the past few years for finally at least getting the subject of inequality and economic fairness on the national politicians list of things they talk about because neither major party nobody in those parties just about was talking about the increasing share of the national wealth that a very small number of people and companies have accumulated with the occupy movements at least there's some lip service given to it but that's not going to be enough and most of the response to that has been that we need more economic growth and we need some redistribution of wealth so that people have more but there's still almost zero dealing with the fact that we all know that growth can't go on forever and that we do have to recognize their boundaries that we're already crossing in our global environmental impact there have to be very strict boundaries and the solution to this inequality problem is not to have all strata of society continue increasing their consumption people whether in this country and certainly in other countries there are lots of people who could use some increase in consumption they're under consuming and suffering for it now but the majority of people in at least the global north are going to have to cut way back that's where the really intense political argument is going to have to happen and you're right right now nobody or almost nobody seems to be talking about this and it's going to I think it's going to have to mean that we're going to have to see even more serious consequences of our actions before that does happen but if we ever do get to the point where we decide to get a grip on our use of resources and our impact on ecosystems and we actually do something about it it's only after that point that the need for rationing is going to start to be talked about I believe let's go to an area of your discussion that I found very interesting in part because I knew so little about it before and that was food limitations food controls you talk about India and Egypt Cuba you talk about places I've actually been to Cuba and I witnessed some of their rationing at work by the way so I was just a few years ago so I started to think about it then but when you talked about Baladi bread or Baladi bread, however it's pronounced in Egypt and what part that plays in the Arab Spring I was stunned to realize that I had never heard a word of this before Could you sketch out a little bit about the history in Egypt and the bread ration and how that's worked and how it's not worked? Right and this the same overall picture applies in India and Egypt and Iraq and dozens of other countries you could say in the United States with not only the SNAP or formerly the food stamp system but also a lot of commodity distribution systems that the Department of Agriculture has We have our own version of this and in every case it's a situation in which farmers need to get a certain price for their product or they can't survive and you have large populations of people with incomes low enough that they can't afford to pay the price required and actually in Egypt and India and other countries even though they were peripheral to World War II a lot of the original systems started in the wake of World War II when there were even more severe limitations on food supply but as time went on it continued to be necessary for governments to buy up large quantities of grain or cooking oil or other basic staple food commodities and stockpile those and pay the farmers a reasonable price for them buy them up and then find a way to distribute this pool of food to the population in a fair way in many cases as in Cuba as with the case in India at one time and in Egypt and Iraq everyone in the country was eligible for this basic ration of food Now unlike say World War II America or Britain in this case it's not all the food on the market that is rationed it's only the pool of subsidized food which in some of these countries is a big share of the food market but it's not everything For that part there are specific shares of food at a specific price that are available if people can pay more and are willing to then they can buy more outside of the system This system over time governments of course have tried to save money by limiting the system only to people below a certain income or by eliminating different types of food from the system and often that is what has sparked a lot of civil unrest so there were the bread riots in Egypt in 1977 and then when global prices rose in 2008 there were more serious riots There in Iraq which had to put in place a food ration system after the Gulf War of 91 and has had it ever since whenever they've tried to restrict or eliminate the system there's been unrest and people universally say everybody I've talked to and everything I read in those countries reflected people's conclusion that a system that ensures physical quantities of food to everyone is more desirable than simply an income supplement system where the government just sends people a certain quantity of money each month and says go out and buy your own food because people know how erratic the world food system is and that any given week suddenly the price of rice or flour could triple and but they want more than the large quantities of food is security of their food supply and consistency because obviously food is something that they need every day Another area that you talk about you go into some detail about carbon emissions you know what's going to lead to global warming global climate change which has been leading to it you talk about things like cap and trade, carbon tax, personal carbon allowances, tradable energy quotas You've got so many facets that I had no idea were there I guess it's true whenever you focus in on something I assume that this thing about energy is of particularly interest to you because of your previous book losing our cool In any way you slice it was the impetus for this book global warming? Yeah both with losing our cool which was about air conditioning and this book the kind of headline problem being addressed is global warming and climate disruption But when I started looking at both things it became clear that there are a lot of other issues as well so I early in any way you slice it I cited a study about eminent group of ecologists saying and this was back in 2009 that there are nine different global planetary boundaries they called them one of them being the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere but others being things like species loss and pollution of the environment with nitrogen degradation of sea life and in various boundaries that they say if we cross those and don't pull back in time It's on one way street then you know things are going to continue going downhill and that we have in fact crossed about half of those boundaries that they say take us into uncharted territory and that we're threatening to cross other ones So that it's not just CO2 concentration in the atmosphere but a whole host of signals that whole ecosystems are breaking down and so I don't want to sound like total doom and gloom here but when we focus on only on carbon Sometimes the solutions for dealing with that can be put stress on these other factors that we're also losing a grip on Behind so many of the factors shortages issues that we'll run into is the population that we have on the planet and so you do have a short section of the book where you talk about birth control rationing you know the one child policy in China But you didn't make that a very much of a major issue is that because it's completely non-palatable to tell people how many kids are going to have? Since the book was about rationing and part of the idea of the book was that rationing in different realms of life has better or worse prospects One of the sort of overall trends that I could see was that closer the rationing policy gets to our own biology and our own personal to our own persons that the less likely it is to succeed And certainly it's always created a lot of stress in societies when governments have tried to go beyond voluntary programs for family planning or population policy And tried to get into mandatory or compulsory ones and that there were some terrible examples in India in the 70s and there's been quite a bit of strife and a lot of loosening of China's policies But other examples of this were proposals for example to reduce obesity and improve people's heart health and so forth by rationing of meat And I argued that if we're going to have meat rationing for example it ought to be framed as a way to reduce the huge carbon footprint and ecological footprint that industrial meat production has Because that's something that people can possibly anyway be convinced is a problem for everyone rather than interfering with people's personal diet because people can say well I don't care, I'd like meat and I'll take the risk of a heart attack Or people will say I want to have more children and then the other area which I ended up devoting whole chapter two that is very difficult to deal with because it goes to our very being is medical care rationing And that's even harder probably than carbon or energy rationing to find a way that will actually work There's big questions there and ethics and morality play a major part in it, the fair share concept certainly comes out because this is spirit and action I did want to ask you Stan a little bit about your religious ethical moral spiritual overview that means that you spent your time not working on plant breeding writing books, so what is your religious spiritual background and current status? Well I grew up in the Methodist church but I haven't been an adherent of any religion or spiritual group during most of my adult life, it's more I think motivated me to write these books is a real concern about injustice and very specifically ecological injustice And the fact that all these things that the environmental movement specifically and people in general see as being a horrible mat max type future that lies ahead of us if we don't do something and that we have to find a kind of a comfortable way to reduce our environmental impact so that we can continue to live comfortable Ignoring the fact that that nightmare future that we're concerned about is already the present for a billion or two people in the world and their numbers are growing every day so that the terrible injustice of that is probably the basis for them thinking about rationing as something that we have to do better to address that In terms of your ethical overview you know why this is important I mean one of the thoughts it's certainly easy to have is I think most of the species on the planet would be better off if we could eliminate a large percentage of the people on the planet right you know if we if we cut down the number of people most plants and animals would thrive in comparison to what they're doing now So obviously we take a view that includes our human point of view plus some wider picture so I'm wondering if you've evolved some sense of that for yourself a spiritual review if not a religious one Yeah I think one thing that bears on this is my it's kind of a contradictory way to look at it maybe but that each of us really does have an ethical obligation to get control of our own impact not only on the natural world but on the economic and social forces that are causing so much misery So but at the same time that we do have I believe an imperative to do that we have to recognize that that's not going to be enough because and I go through many examples from the path that moral exhortations to voluntary restraint or voluntary action always hit a limit and there are various reasons for that but as what we can some of us can manage to do as individual society as a whole can't do because of the economic system that we have doesn't have any morals and it's going to do what it's going to do So that that's why we need to go through the very difficult process of coming to a common agreement about some rules that everybody is going to live by and that's what I'm not sure if we'll be able to do that or not These basic limits that we just cannot cross we can't depend on our morals and ethics to do that individually translating into society as a whole doing it so I guess then there is this sort of nether moral obligation to try to come up with a system that society as a whole can live by and everybody can or at least enough people can agree with And we can only hope we can get our act together before too much damage has been done right now with the gridlock we've seen in Congress and really I'm not just putting it on Congress I think this is something at a very local level in the United States in state of Wisconsin I think people are very closely closely divided you know that there are people who say yeah this is perfectly good thing that changes that our governor Scott Walker has led that's good for us and there's about an equal number of people saying this is the most horrible thing in the world So I'm not sure where we're going to find the wisdom to pull this together but I think that by all the information that you've gathered in any way you slice it the past present and future rationing that you Stan Cox have given us some vital pieces for us to make a good decision for the future And if people only take a good look at it I think that they'll find that there is some possibility for a brighter future if we can all pull together so I want to thank you for doing that work I want to thank you for reading plants because I like to eat plants I'm a vegetarian long standing so I want to thank you for all of that kind of work but also especially for spending this time today with me for a spirit in action Well thank you Mark I really enjoyed it Thanks to Stan Cox for joining us today SliceIt.org is the website for his new book or just find him via Nordenspiritradio.org And thanks also to support for this program from attorney Catherine B. Schultz, a nuclear Wisconsin attorney who believes in honesty, accuracy and world healing work and therefore supports the work of Nordenspirit radio Her world healing includes helping her clients get a new start to their finances by guiding them through bankruptcy when needed You can call Catherine B. Schultz at 715-835-8904 Also thanks to singer-songwriter Carol Johnson for the song that we'll close the show with on the theme of, shall we say, "Unhealthy Greed" Something that we'll probably need to address with rationing Carol Johnson's song is "Bigger, Bigger, Bigger" We'll see you next week for "Spirit in Action" Bigger, Bigger, Bigger, Bigger, more, more, more Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts It's time we learn to say, "Enough is enough" We had a week's vacation to take a trip of West We went real fast, passed everything so we could see the rest We went 10,000 miles, but I don't know where we were 'Cause when we got back home, all I remembered was a blur Bigger, Bigger, Bigger, Bigger, more, more, more Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts It's time we learn to say, "Enough is enough" Mama made a pie, the best I ever ate She handed me a piece, but I took the whole plate My face is turning green, I'm gonna lose it That's my soul, the whole delicious pie is going down the toilet bowl Bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more Give me, give me, give me, hey, what's it all for? Faster, faster, faster, this is absolutely nuts It's time we learn to say, "Enough is enough" Before he built a car, clever little thing, he was so pleased he said, "Hey, let's do it again." Now you go Sunday driving to see the scenery, and all there are cars. [Music] Now I wrote 20 verses into this little song, but every time I sang them all, everybody on play. I whittled and I figgled, and I don't remember how I cut it down to four, I hope you let it down. [Music] The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.

Stan Cox is also author of Losing Our Cool