Acts of Rebel Sanity: Finding ways to navigate the challenges of living on a small planet.

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Lappe, Frances Moore

I am a child of the sixties, fed by its energy and hope.

In 1962, in its Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society called for participatory democracy, and it sure made sense to me.

Fresh out of college in 1967--and pumped up by recent, historic civil rights and voting rights wins--I joined Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty. I tried to live up to its premise of "maximum feasible participation" as I worked in Philadelphia side-by-side with single moms seeking decent housing.

But by the late 1960s, a very different energy gripped our culture: fear.

In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich's Population Bomb exploded, warning that we were nearing the limits of Earths ability to feed us. At the same time, Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" argued that we were having too many babies, saying we can preserve "precious freedoms" only by "relinquishing the freedom to breed."

At the time, millions of people were dying in African famines.

I had to know: Is scarcity behind all this suffering?

Fortunately, I had access to the agricultural library at the University of California, Berkeley. With my dad's slide rule and a friendly librarian's help, I dug in. Soon the math was undeniable: Our world was producing enough food for all, but our meat-centric food system involved staggering amounts of waste.

We couldn't blame population growth for hunger and starvation. Instead, our supposedly bright species was actively creating scarcity, regardless of how much food we were...