The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic

An urgent call for the political transformation needed to address the common causes of climate change, COVID-19, and racism.

" . . . some big titles will address emergencies that have outlived Trump. The Path to a Livable Future by Stan Cox, explores the connections among the many crises of the past year and a half."--Dorany Pineda, Los Angeles Times

2020 was a year defined by crisis. For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm about the urgency of addressing climate change, but it took COVID-19 to demonstrate clearly that the future of human life on Earth is interconnected and at risk. While the virus quickly spread across the globe, extreme weather events compounded the suffering and economic catastrophe. In the U.S., public demonstrations of outrage over the murder of George Floyd expanded to include a growing awareness of the pandemic's disproportionate impact on communities of color. In cities around the world, people took to the streets to protest racial inequity in all of its forms.

In The Path to a Livable Future, Stan Cox makes plain the connections between the multiple crises facing us today, and provides an inspired vision for how to resolve them. With a deeply informed, clear to-do list, Cox shows us how we can work together to address the climate emergency, white supremacy, and our vulnerability to future pandemics all at once. Our future depends on it.

"An iconoclast of the best kind, Stan Cox has an all-too-rare commitment to following arguments wherever they lead, however politically
dangerous that turns out to be."--Naomi Klein

"Cox lays out a refreshingly grounded roadmap for the survival of all life on earth, based on up-to-date science, and anchored in the racial justice imperative."--Leah Penniman, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land

"Above all, he shows that a healthy, just, sustainable future is possible if we reduce our ecological footprint and share the earth's gifts equitably. For this we need to organize, resist, imagine, and forge another path together."--Vandana Shiva, author of Who Really Feeds the World?: The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology

Stan Cox began his career in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For twenty years Cox was the Lead Scientist at The Land Institute, where he currently serves as a research scholar in Ecosphere Studies. Cox is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can; 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 forty-three U.S. states. In 2012, The Atlantic named Cox their "Readers' Choice Brave Thinker" for his critique of air conditioning.