Half-Earth Socialism
A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics
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Narrated by:
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Paul Heitsch
About this listen
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 PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Age of Discovery
- Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
- By: Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Age of Discovery explores a world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks: how do we share more widely the benefits of unprecedented progress? How do we endure the inevitable tumult generated by accelerating change? How do we each thrive through this tangled, uncertain time? From gains in health, education, wealth and technology to crises of conflict, disease and mass migration, the similarities between today's world and that of the 15th century are both striking and prophetic: we have been here before.
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A monotonous text disguised as casual reading.
- By Rob on 07-29-16
By: Ian Goldin, and others
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Abundance
- The Future Is Better Than You Think
- By: Steven Kotler, Peter H. Diamandis
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, and other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years.
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Perhaps multiply his time estimates by 10
- By Rick on 11-06-21
By: Steven Kotler, and others
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The Third Industrial Revolution
- How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
- By: Jeremy Rifkin
- Narrated by: Kevin Foley
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Jeremy Rifkin presents an insider's account of the next great economic era: the Third Industrial Revolution, when a new ethic of sustainability will revolutionize the world we live in.
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Lamenting "The Third Industrial Revolution"
- By Joshua Kim on 05-01-12
By: Jeremy Rifkin
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The Upcycle
- Beyond Sustainability - Designing for Abundance
- By: William McDonough, Michael Braungart
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The Upcycle is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Cradle to Cradle, the most consequential ecological manifesto of our time. Now, drawing on the lessons gained from 10 years of putting the cradle-to-cradle concept into practice with businesses, governments, and ordinary people, William McDonough and Michael Braungart envision the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis: We don't just reuse resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve them as we use them.
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A "must read" for the environmental movement.
- By Love owls on 07-09-13
By: William McDonough, and others
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The Vertical Farm
- Feeding the World in the 21st Century
- By: Dickson Despommier
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. The vertical farm has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. These farms, grown inside skyscrapers, would provide solutions to many of the serious problems we currently face.
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Excellent Brainstorming - Not reality
- By Texas Community Project on 01-25-11
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Fossil Future
- Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less
- By: Alex Epstein
- Narrated by: Alex Epstein
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing--including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right.
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Strongly Recommend
- By Kevin on 06-14-22
By: Alex Epstein
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The Rational Optimist
- How Prosperity Evolves
- By: Matt Ridley
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.
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Personal
- By Robert F. Jones on 09-15-17
By: Matt Ridley
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Trekonomics
- The Economics of Star Trek
- By: Manu Saadia
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What would the world look like if everybody had everything they wanted or needed? Trekonomics, the premier book in financial journalist Felix Salmon's imprint PiperText, approaches scarcity economics by coming at it backward - through thinking about a universe where scarcity does not exist. Delving deep into the details and intricacies of 24th-century society, Trekonomics explores post-scarcity and whether we, as humans, are equipped for it.
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An Amusing & Practical Analysis of Fictional Ideas
- By Lost In The Wash on 09-19-16
By: Manu Saadia
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The Well-Tempered City
- What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life
- By: Jonathan F. P. Rose
- Narrated by: Barry Abrams
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity - and the home of 80 percent of the world's population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, and education and health disparities, among many others.
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The best way to save the future is to look at the past
- By Kate on 10-01-22
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Nonzero
- The Logic of Human Destiny
- By: Robert Wright
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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At the beginning of Nonzero, Robert Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." Twenty-two chapters later, after a sweeping and vivid narrative of the human past, he has succeeded and has mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional view that evolution and human history are aimless.
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Non-Zero (but pretty close to zero)
- By Douglas on 02-06-14
By: Robert Wright
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The Vanishing Face of Gaia
- A Final Warning
- By: James Lovelock
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, British scientist James Lovelock predicts global warming will lead to a Hot Epoch. Lovelock is best known for formulating the controversial Gaia theory in the 1970s, with Ruth Margulis of the University of Massachusetts, which states that organisms interact with and regulate Earth's surface and atmosphere. We ignore this interaction at our peril.
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A New Perspective - A Must Listen - Very Moving
- By Thomas on 01-29-12
By: James Lovelock
What listeners say about Half-Earth Socialism
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Santiago Hernandez
- 05-12-22
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.
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- Jeffrey D
- 11-22-22
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.
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