Half-Earth Socialism

A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics

By: Troy Vettesse, Drew Pendergrass

Narrated by: Paul Heitsch

A plan to save the Earth and bring the good life to all

In this thrilling and capacious book, Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass challenge the inertia of capitalism and the left alike and propose a radical plan to address climate disaster and guarantee the good life for all. Consumption in the global North can’t continue unabated, and we must give up the idea that humans can fully control the Earth through technological “fixes” that only wreak further havoc.

Rather than allow the forces of the free market to destroy the planet, we must strive for a post-capitalist society able to guarantee the good life for the entire planet. This plan, which they call half-Earth socialism, means we must:

• Rewild half the Earth to absorb carbon emissions and restore biodiversity,
• Pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy, paired with drastic cuts in consumption by the world’s wealthiest populations,
• Enact global veganism to cut down on energy and land use,
• Inaugurate worldwide socialist planning to efficiently and equitably manage production, and
• Welcome the participation of everyone—even you!

Accompanied by a climate-modeling website inviting listeners to design their own “half Earth,” Vettesse and Pendergrass offer us a visionary way forward—and our only hope for a future.

©2022 by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass (P)2022 by Blackstone Publishing

Please read this!

Such an important book! I learned so much and it made me want to find other people to discuss and (un)build with. Also there is an online game that goes along with the game at half.earth

Great Book/Listen

It is pretty dense and I probably need to listen to it multiple times in the future. However, I really appreciate the vision that this text presents and I think that it's synthesis of ecology, climate science, and socialist planning is something that should be discussed more about.

Implausible and disingenuous

This eccentric book is an attempt to persuade the reader that only a socialist revolution and its aftermath is capable of dealing with climate change and other challenges. At least for this reader, the authors fail at this project. Indeed, they barely even try, in a short book that scarcely touches on most of the relevant issues, although it does give a history of the socialist calculation debate, albeit caricaturing the authors’ special enemy Hayek, while never showing that the socialist alternatives are much more than a fond hope. It is noteworthy that even that fond hope is not even close to possible without an enormous amount of computing power and speed. So what was the point of all the agitating for socialism before the requisite amounts of computing power and speed existed? All the premature agitating led to was the disastrous adventure in Russia (as one example), which killed millions, ruined Russia, devastated the natural environment, and left in its ruins to this day a destabilizing force in the world with Putin and his cabal wreaking destruction and threatening even more. Can we believe these two young authors with their barely argued narrative, when they claim that socialism is finally ready for prime time?

To achieve world socialism, there is to be a revolution, or many of them. How is this to happen? Barely a word. What kind of revolution will it be? Barely a word. Who will be the agents of this revolution? Barely a word. Will opponents, and there will be many opponents of this unusual approach to socialism (widespread and even enforced veganism, half of the world rewilded, just to mention two characteristics of their form of socialism), be killed? Re-educated? Sent to gulags? Or join in happily? Barely a word. What of the transition to socialism immediately after the revolution? Barely a word. How is socialism to be instantiated without abundance? Barely a word. What will be the response of the vast majority of the world’s people to an utterly Eurocentric set of ideas? Barely a word.

I will here pick out a couple (out of many) of the authors’ implausible and disingenuous ideas. First, the Periodo especial in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union is presented as a time leading to partial rewilding and organic urban gardens, which is (despite some “difficulties”) a model for the kind of utopian socialism they argue for. Difficulties indeed. Unlike these two authors, who were children at the time of the Periodo especial, I was a grownup when I was present in Cuba toward the end of the 1990s as a tourist. If Half Earth Socialism is even partly like Cuban society at that time, No thanks. There were gardens, I imagine (although I did not see them), but because most of the populace was on the brink of starvation. There was rewilding, but because most of the country had gone to seed because of economic collapse. We stayed at a hotel catering to European tourists, which hotels served all-you-can-eat buffets. Jobs at the hotels were coveted, because the Cuban employees were able to take home the leftovers of the Europeans to feed their extended families. One of these employees told us that, because of the dire poverty and lack of food, “All Cuban women are whores.” I suppose this was something of an exaggeration, but I myself saw evidence of the truth in the statement. We went to a bar in Havana that was famous as Ernest Hemingway’s hangout. Standing in a semicircle around the front of the bar were 30 or 40 sex workers, waiting for business from the tourists. Cuba had thus reverted to the very soul-destroying poverty that had caused the Castro revolution in the first place. Marxists and other socialists have often had problems with perceiving inconvenient facts, particularly when it comes to Cuba. Now these two authors hope that their view through rose-colored glasses will persuade you, Dear Reader, to support their version of revolutionary socialism. On the Periodo especial at least, they do not know what they are talking about.

Second, a section of the book is devoted to telling the story of a fictional visitor to a small town in Massachusetts after the revolution, to give the reader a feel for how life will be lived under socialism. The town is organized something like a hippie commune populated by people from Lake Wobegon (where all the children are above average). Everyone is depicted as living in a pastoral paradise, engaging in much chuckling and smiling, surrounded by the scent of flowers and the buzzing of well-behaved bees. Everyone, young and old, is learning advanced mathematics, evidently because the socialist society is organized by technocrats who use advanced mathematical models to optimize the use of resources. But of course this is not a fair description of the authors’ socialist society; it is instead disingenuous propaganda (and the narrator’s polemical reading style throughout is equally propagandistic). It is an oddly persuasive form of propaganda – see the enormous numbers of such pastoral utopias founded, only inevitably to fail, throughout US history. It would be much more difficult, of course, to show how their utopia might handle hard work, scientific research, dentistry, urban living, childrearing, universities, mental illness, power, status, death, birth, cancer, and on and on and on. None of these are given even glancing attention in Half Earth Socialism. If you don’t believe that this section of the book can possibly be so one sided, be my guest: read the book.