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A review by tgestabrook
Half-Earth Socialism: A Manifesto to Save the Future by Drew Pendergrass, Troy Vettesse
4.0
Uneven but ambitious and provocative. Overall I agree with its program but it has some major shortcomings. The book is a bit of a chimera and each chapter warrants attention in turn:
Chapter 1 makes an argument for 'ecological humility' in the grounds that we don't understand ecology nearly as well as we like to think. From this, two conclusions: 1) geoengineering (e.g. solar radiation management) is extremely dangerous and 2) the neoliberal argument that the economy is too mysterious to control is subverted by the higher-order mysteriousness of life. If we have to regulate one, let it be the economy. 'Ecological humility' is set against Marxist prometheanism and right-wing Malthusianism, and attention is drawn to holistic concerns of mass extinction and zoonotic disease alongside climate change.
Chapter 2 takes aim at 'demi-utopias' proposed for managing the environmental crisis with minimal social change (e.g. carbon capture, nuclear energy, colonial conservation). Ultimately, the argument is made for socialist implementation of massive rewilding, veganism, energy quotas and solar/wind power.
Chapter 3 shifts to a discussion of economic planning with Otto Neurath, Leonid Kantorovich, and Cybersyn as primary touchstones. Being a math nerd, I wish they had delved deeper in to the specifics, but the main takeaways are: 1) there exist mathematical techniques for optimizing supply chains and production without the need for monetary price signals, 2) advances in down-scaling and up-scaling complex meteorological models used for studying climate change could provide a framework for multi-scale democratic planning that preserves regional autonomy.
Chapter 4 is a fictional short story riffing on William Morris' News From Nowhere in which a young man in 2023 awakens in an eco-socialist 2047. It's good leftist literature insofar as it is mostly tedious and didactic. There's an element of 'doth protest too much' in that all the characters seem overly happy about their intensely energy-restricted lives spent tilling bean fields and sharing washing machines; the only character to complain about not eating meat is dismissed as a grouchy crank. To be clear, I share the authors belief that the grotesque energy consumption of a modern American middle-class consumer is not necessary to the good life, but their presentation of socialism has the pasted-on smiles reminiscent of an account of being toured around North Korea or something. Despite citing Ursula K. LeGuin as an inspiration, they missed the part in The Dispossessed where she honestly portrayed the complaints of communal life *while still making them seem better than capitalism*.
In general, I found Chapters 1 and 3 the most rewarding and original. The ecological humility argument in Ch. 1 is the strongest case against certain strains of optimistic prometheanism I have found, and I love that it also provides a basis for rejecting neoliberalism. I wish Chapter 3 was its own book, because it was provocative and inspiring and made me want to study in-natura economic modeling.
The weakness of the book comes through in Chapters 2 and 4, which oddly work at cross-purposes with 1 and 3. The thrust of 1 and 3 is something like: "we are up against hard ecological limits and need a non-Malthusian way to constrain human activity (1) and we have powerful tools for managing human activity by democratically choosing between many different planning scenarios at different scales (3)". There is an open-endedness here where the planning tools enable optimizing for many different concerns. But then Chapters 2 and 4 veer off by promoting a highly specific program. In particular, the authors have taken a lot of criticism about their anti-nuclear stance (something I'm currently agnostic about) and their commitment to specifically ethical veganism (something I'm loosely sympathetic to but do not share). These underlying dogmas muddle what I see as the really interesting contributions in HES.
All told, HES packs more provocation and originality into 150 pages than any other eco-socialist book I have read, and despite its shortcomings is definitely an extremely worthwhile read.
Chapter 1 makes an argument for 'ecological humility' in the grounds that we don't understand ecology nearly as well as we like to think. From this, two conclusions: 1) geoengineering (e.g. solar radiation management) is extremely dangerous and 2) the neoliberal argument that the economy is too mysterious to control is subverted by the higher-order mysteriousness of life. If we have to regulate one, let it be the economy. 'Ecological humility' is set against Marxist prometheanism and right-wing Malthusianism, and attention is drawn to holistic concerns of mass extinction and zoonotic disease alongside climate change.
Chapter 2 takes aim at 'demi-utopias' proposed for managing the environmental crisis with minimal social change (e.g. carbon capture, nuclear energy, colonial conservation). Ultimately, the argument is made for socialist implementation of massive rewilding, veganism, energy quotas and solar/wind power.
Chapter 3 shifts to a discussion of economic planning with Otto Neurath, Leonid Kantorovich, and Cybersyn as primary touchstones. Being a math nerd, I wish they had delved deeper in to the specifics, but the main takeaways are: 1) there exist mathematical techniques for optimizing supply chains and production without the need for monetary price signals, 2) advances in down-scaling and up-scaling complex meteorological models used for studying climate change could provide a framework for multi-scale democratic planning that preserves regional autonomy.
Chapter 4 is a fictional short story riffing on William Morris' News From Nowhere in which a young man in 2023 awakens in an eco-socialist 2047. It's good leftist literature insofar as it is mostly tedious and didactic. There's an element of 'doth protest too much' in that all the characters seem overly happy about their intensely energy-restricted lives spent tilling bean fields and sharing washing machines; the only character to complain about not eating meat is dismissed as a grouchy crank. To be clear, I share the authors belief that the grotesque energy consumption of a modern American middle-class consumer is not necessary to the good life, but their presentation of socialism has the pasted-on smiles reminiscent of an account of being toured around North Korea or something. Despite citing Ursula K. LeGuin as an inspiration, they missed the part in The Dispossessed where she honestly portrayed the complaints of communal life *while still making them seem better than capitalism*.
In general, I found Chapters 1 and 3 the most rewarding and original. The ecological humility argument in Ch. 1 is the strongest case against certain strains of optimistic prometheanism I have found, and I love that it also provides a basis for rejecting neoliberalism. I wish Chapter 3 was its own book, because it was provocative and inspiring and made me want to study in-natura economic modeling.
The weakness of the book comes through in Chapters 2 and 4, which oddly work at cross-purposes with 1 and 3. The thrust of 1 and 3 is something like: "we are up against hard ecological limits and need a non-Malthusian way to constrain human activity (1) and we have powerful tools for managing human activity by democratically choosing between many different planning scenarios at different scales (3)". There is an open-endedness here where the planning tools enable optimizing for many different concerns. But then Chapters 2 and 4 veer off by promoting a highly specific program. In particular, the authors have taken a lot of criticism about their anti-nuclear stance (something I'm currently agnostic about) and their commitment to specifically ethical veganism (something I'm loosely sympathetic to but do not share). These underlying dogmas muddle what I see as the really interesting contributions in HES.
All told, HES packs more provocation and originality into 150 pages than any other eco-socialist book I have read, and despite its shortcomings is definitely an extremely worthwhile read.