1/16/2024 0 Comments Slice itThe ecological crisis afflicting the planet has mutated into a savage political and economic crisis that threatens to erode the very foundations of human culture. “The warning signs are flashing ominously everywhere you turn: warming climate, swelling populations, dwindling water supplies, rising food costs, a host of new deadly diseases, and a widening chasm between the super-rich and the destitute. The author of Losing Our Cool, the much-debated and widely acclaimed examination of air-conditioning’s many impacts, here turns his attention to the politically explosive topic of how we share our planet’s resources. And in this provocative and thoughtful book Cox asks: can we limit consumption while assuring everyone a fair share? Any Way You Slice It takes us on a fascinating search for alternative ways of apportioning life’s necessities, from the wartime goal of “fair shares for all” in the 1940s to present-day water rationing in a Mumbai slum, from the bread shops of Cairo to the struggle for fairness in American medicine and carbon rationing on Norfolk Island in the Pacific. Instead, he persuasively argues that how we ration is a crucial issue in our fragile present, an era of dwindling resources and environmental crises. In Any Way You Slice It, Stan Cox shows that fair-shares rationing is not just a quaint practice restricted to World War II memoirs and stories of gas-station lines in the 1970s. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has said, the results can be “thoroughly unequal and nasty.” Health care expert Henry Aaron has compared mentioning the possibility of rationing to “shouting an obscenity in church.” Yet societies ration food, water, medical care, and fuel all the time, with those who can pay the most getting the most. ![]() Rationing: it’s a word-and idea-that people seem to fear and hate in equal measure.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |