DeepSummary
In this episode, Sean and Aaron interview Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, authors of the book 'Half Earth Socialism'. They discuss the utopian concepts presented in the book, which promotes rewilding half of the Earth to protect biodiversity and transitioning to an ecologically sustainable socialist society. The authors explain the empirical basis for the 'Half Earth' idea, the necessity of reducing energy consumption and animal agriculture, and their vision of democratic socialist planning.
A key part of the discussion revolves around critiquing techno-utopian solutions like nuclear power, geoengineering, and lab-grown meat as insufficient or problematic for truly addressing environmental crises. Instead, the authors advocate for a more holistic approach centered on rewilding, reducing consumption, and transitioning away from unsustainable practices through democratic planning.
The authors also highlight the importance of utopianism in motivating social movements and present their 'Half Earth' game as a way to explore the trade-offs and interconnections between different environmental factors. Overall, the episode delves into the authors' thought-provoking proposals for an ecological, equitable, and democratically planned future society.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The authors propose rewilding half the Earth's surface as a necessary step to prevent mass extinction and biodiversity loss.
- Reducing overconsumption, especially of animal products and fossil fuels, is crucial for achieving environmental sustainability.
- Visions of ecological utopias motivate social movements and help resolve conflicts over differing political goals on the left.
- Techno-utopian solutions like nuclear power, geoengineering, and lab-grown meat are critiqued as insufficient or problematic.
- Democratic socialist planning based on public participation in evaluating multiple proposals is advocated as a way to transition society.
- The 'Half Earth' game aims to illustrate trade-offs between environmental factors and facilitate democratic decision-making.
- Utopianism plays a valuable role in imagining and working towards better futures, but must grapple with real-world constraints.
- Overall, the authors present a holistic, ecologically-grounded vision for a planned, equitable, sustainable socialist society.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “If you actually save half the world for nature preserves, which would be increasing the amount of protected land around three or five fold, you would stop the 6th extinction event, where many species will go extinct over the next century, and you would have to rewild lots of land and sea to do that.“ by Troy Vittese
- “The point of the game is to illustrate these different possibilities and allow people to remix and come up with their own goals. One of our original goals of the game is to really stress democracy by making it a massive multiplayer game where everyone would take on a certain region of the world and you'd have to negotiate together to come up with plans which would be kind of more like how things might really work.“ by Drew Pendergrass
- “We talk about James Hansen, who's the famous scientist in 1988 who testified to Congress about global warming. He had this plan to say, we'll increase the number of reactors tenfold over the next generation. And that means building more than 100 reactors every year for 30 years. And that would just. I forget the exact number. It was something. It would replace half or maybe all electrical production. But trying to make that many reactors means you would actually run out of good uranium deposits very quickly.“ by Troy Vittese
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Episode Information
Srsly Wrong
Srsly Wrong
7/18/23