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Rundown
In this episode, Mexie talks with Marxist, vegan academic and activist, Dr. Troy Vettese, about his new co-authored book (with Drew Pendergrass), Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan To Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. We start by discussing the importance of utopian socialism and reinvigorating our radical creativity to be daring enough to lay out clear visions for post-capitalist futures. Troy then takes us through his critiques of geogengineering and nuclear power as non-solutions that support the status quo, and the links between animal agriculture, capitalism and ecological crisis. We then get into a brief history of important thinkers in Soviet planning and Cybernetics, and how Troy and Drew drew on these thinkers to develop multi-metric models to determine what possible futures we could imagine that would be sustainable for 10 billion people. Troy also takes us through their specific proposals and exercises in visionary fiction with regards to Half-Earth Socialism. For anyone interested in playing with the models, they’ve developed a video game that allows everyone to try their hand at planning and devise potential scenarios for sustainable, socialist futures.
Sources and Links
- Half-Earth Socialism: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3818-half-earth-socialism
- Half-Earth Socialism Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2071530/HalfEarth_Socialism/
- Half-Earth Socialism Website: https://www.half.earth/
- Troy Vettese on Academia.edu: https://eui.academia.edu/TroyVettese
- Troy Vettese on Twitter: https://twitter.com/troyvettese?lang=en
- Troy’s email: Troy.VETTESE@eui.eu
- Mexie (critique of capitalist Half Earth), Conserving Half The Earth Won’t Save Us – Neoliberal Nature and the Half Earth Movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v2ZHllKvNs
- Total Liberation episode 71 – Speciesism Isn’t What You Think It Is w. Marine & Nic: https://totalliberationpodcast.com/71-speciesism-isnt-what-you-think-it-is-w-marine-nix/
- Total Liberation episode 80 – Taking Plant Sentience Seriously w. Nic & Kahtrin: https://totalliberationpodcast.com/80-taking-plant-sentience-seriously-w-nic-kathrin/
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