Half-Earth Socialism
October 3, 2024
I just finished reading the brilliant book Half-Earth Socialism by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese. They argue that the best way to handle the ongoing climate catastrophe, and forge a better society in its wake, is with a socialist planned economy rooted in scientific and ecological principles. Ideally there is widespread veganism, with at least half of Earth's terrestrial area given back to wild nature. This is a radical departure from today's status quo, and the authors make a convincing case that it is both practical and feasible with today's technology. The authors are explicitly charting out a utopian vision, with the goal of providing concrete ideas that bring us closer to our goals of a sustainable global society where all human needs are met.
Underpinning this vision is an epistomological argument. The neoliberal order which controls our world understands the economy to be so complex as to be ultimately unknowable and uncontrollable. The Market is the supreme mechanism of knowledge production, which distributes resources the most efficiently. Therefore, the argument follows, we should loosen as many restrictions on it as possible, and let it lead us to utopia. Clearly, this isn't working. Vettese and Pendergrass argue that Nature is even more unknowable than the Market. The Earth's biosphere is so complex that any attempts to avoid climate catastrophe via geoengineering, which is the Market's solution, is doomed to fail. At best, these measures, such as Solar Radiation Management and large scale carbon capture, only prevent the inevitable, and likely cause unforseen complications. The best solution for lasting change is to rewild the planet, letting Mother Nature take back control of her climate, and consciously direct human economic activity towards the sustainable flourishing of us all.
To this end, the book explores central planning in detail, with a large focus on cybernetics, which is the study of feedback systems. It gives an extremely high level overview of the way that overlapping layers of differential equations can be used to model the economy at differing granularities, which is how contemporary climate and weather modelling works. This completely removes money as a universal measure, instead opting for in natura calculation, i.e. comparing different resource allocations directly. They also admit that while capitalism has a tendency towards surplus, socialism has a tendency towards shortage. This seems to be an inherent part of a planned system, made worse when incentives misalign, such as in the Soviet system where planning departments who appeased the central bureaucry, without necessarily being more efficient, retained decision making power. In order to combat this, planning must be as democratic as possible. For example, a coarse grain plan can be drawn up based on supercomputer simulations of the global economy, and finer grain plans can be created at more local levels to meet the goals of the broader plan in bespoke ways. I'm excited to supplement this book with The People's Republic of Walmart (also from Verso) to learn more about how central planning is already done at large scale within private enterprises.
Conservatism's strength lies in its clear vision for how society ought to be, with the policy proposals to make it happen. Half-Earth Socialism is an attempt to create that for the contemporary Left. A socialist world is a utopia continuously created. Every human is cared for, fed, clothed, and educated. No one is exploited or coerced into a life of toil and misery, as billions are under today's neoliberal capitalist order. Humanity regains humility in our relation to Nature. We treat the biosphere as a partner in shaping the conditions of our beautiful, unique world.
We live in dark times. The world is sick. This we can sense intuitively. Fascism continues to rise; genocide and war abound in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo; ecological breakdown accelerates, as we are witnessing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in southern Appalachia. The rich get richer and we continue to burn fossil fuels. Things only seem to get worse. We must fight harder, we must build bonds with each other, we must have a vision for the world that we want to build, if we are to escape this hell. Half-Earth Socialism doesn't have all the answers, but it lays out a plan. We can disagree with it, iterate on it, mend it, and improve it. We can take control of our destiny.
I highly recommend Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossesed and Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge for some delicious ecosocialist utopian fiction. Godspeed!