Half-Earth Socialism

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

Troy Vettese, Drew Pendergrass

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781839760310
• eBook ISBN: 9781839760327
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Building a society that operates within ecological constraints requires an unleashing of our political imaginations, and this book helps us do just that'
-Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecurity

Half-Earth Socialism is a radical call to action to save the planet, including trenchant proposals to rewild half the earth to absorb carbon emissions and restore biodiversity; rapidly transition to renewable energy, paired with drastic cuts in consumption; and shift to global veganism to reduce energy and land use. As this thrilling and provocative book makes clear, we must humbly accept that humanity cannot fully understand or control the earth - but we can plan new energy systems, large-scale rewilding, and food production for the common good.

'Half-Earth Socialism embraces the hardest choices, the most exacting ecological constraints, and thinks with them to reinvent climate utopianism'
-Richard Seymour, New Statesman

'Vegan cookbook meets Minecraft ... flips the age of dystopias into a renewal of the genre of utopia ... empowers readers to write their own recipes for a future in peril'
-Andreas Malm, author of Fossil Capital

'A remarkable manifesto ... that envisages the immediate liberation of the entire world from the grip of capitalist exploitation'
-Le Monde diplomatique

1

Binding Prometheus

From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement [man] has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.

–Edward Jenner

In the Sonoran Desert there are ziggurats of glass and steel, a gleaming facility that looks like a Martian space station. Biosphere 2, as it is called, lies just beyond the exurban edge of Tucson in the hamlet of Oracle, but once it seemed to be the centre of the world. It was designed as a closed system able to produce its own atmosphere, plant life, and water cycle by mimicking the delicate balance of Biosphere 1 (i.e., Earth). This monument to pharaonic ecology was built in 1989 by members of a commune established twenty years before – the Synergia Ranch – where everyone was to some extent a thespian, cybernetician, gardener, sailor, and entrepreneur. John Allen, the commune’s leader, was the driving force behind Biosphere 2, but it was Ed Bass, another denizen of the Synergia Ranch and scion of a Texan oil dynasty, who bankrolled it. Bass and Allen, who each exhibited a hippie’s heart and a businessman’s brain, hoped to understand the natural world while earning a tidy profit. In the future, they believed, either the environmental crisis would displace humanity to the stars or a nuclear war would drive the species underground. Their firm, Space Biospheres Ventures, was intended to cater to both markets.

Biosphere 2 belonged to a long line of Cold War environmental research focused on escaping Earth’s surface. Ecological concepts such as ‘carrying capacity’ first emerged in the 1950s research programme on ‘cabin ecology’: the study of human life in spacecraft, submarines, and bomb shelters.¹ CO₂ ‘scrubbing’ technology, which underpins ‘carbon capture and sequestration’ systems today, was originally developed for the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine. The Nautilus could stay submerged longer than conventional submarines, which required advanced air-recycling technology (especially since the crew smoked).² The crucial moment during the ill-starred Apollo 13 mission was when the astronauts had to jerry-rig a CO₂ scrubber so they could survive the return voyage on their broken craft. Inspired by such artificial life-support systems, the military designer Buckminster Fuller coined the term ‘spaceship Earth’ in the early 1960s.³ Fuller relied on military aircraft construction techniques for his designs, including the geodesic dome, that quintessentially ‘eco’ structure.⁴ In 1962, almost thirty years before Biosphere 2 was built, the Ecological Society of America held a meeting to discuss the possibility of building a lunar base complete with a ‘general life support system’ able to circulate nutrients, oxygen, and CO₂ among cohabiting plants, animals, and astronauts.⁵

If the early Cold War sparked interest in closed systems, the ‘New Cold War’ of the 1980s revived this otherworldly market. Bass was confident that his verdant and ecological designs were superior to NASA’s lifeless ‘space cans’ and sought to become a contractor for the new American space station Freedom before its planned launch in 1992.⁶ Until the new eco-space industry took off, Bass hoped to recoup some of his investment by attracting tourists to his ‘ecological Disneyland’ in Oracle.⁷ Within the gleaming walls of Biosphere 2, one could find five ecosystems reproduced in miniature: tropical rainforest, coastal fog desert, mangrove wetland, savannah, and ocean (with a coral reef!). There was also an agricultural area for crops and livestock, a laboratory, and living quarters for the crew. An assortment of mechanical and biological systems was needed to maintain Biosphere 2. The ‘Technosphere’ controlled air temperature and humidity, the ‘Energy Center’ ventilated air and regulated water temperature, and the massive mechanical ‘Lungs’ managed air pressure. There were also algal filtration to clean the water and a soil-bed reactor to aerate the soil and nourish its essential microbial ecosystem. Such systems were expensive, and Biosphere 2 – essentially a fancy greenhouse on a one-hectare plot – lost Bass $200 million. Given such immense resources, its purpose seemed modest enough: to keep eight ‘biospherians’ alive for two years without allowing anything (not even air) in or out of the complex. Two ‘missions’ were carried out at Biosphere 2 between 1991 and 1994. Both ended in disaster.

Before the end of the first mission, the biospherians had inadvertently managed to replicate many of the different facets of the environmental crisis in miniature – an appropriate outcome for an experiment conducted in a place named Oracle. Biosphere 2 was wracked by elevated CO₂ levels, extinction, loss of pollinators, dying coral reefs, invasive species, and eutrophication. Over-vigorous soil microbes, rather than fossil-fuel emissions, destabilized Biosphere 2’s atmospheric chemistry: microbial breath reacted with concrete to create calcium carbonate, sequestering oxygen in the walls to the detriment of the living creatures within them. While the biospherians grew listless from the lack of oxygen, many creatures simply perished. Soon, all the pollinators were dead, leaving many plants to live on borrowed time.⁸ The biospherians had to pollinate their crops by hand, an experience that eerily foreshadowed bee-less farming in Biosphere 1 two decades later.⁹ Harvests were hard-earned but unsatisfying. Meat was a rare indulgence, and often there was little food of any kind. Starving crew members ate peanuts, shells and all, while the artificial biosphere around them withered into an empty husk.¹⁰ Mission command finally relented and pumped a tonne of liquid oxygen into the complex. Although the biospherians danced with joy at this deus ex machina, the intervention nixed the project’s scientific value as a study of closed systems.

Manna from heaven might have revived the biospherians, but it could not bring Biosphere 2 back to life. Some 19 of its 25 vertebrates went extinct, along with a majority of the 125 insect species.¹¹ The mass death of insects is a rare phenomenon, having occurred only during the third mass extinction (the ‘end-Permian’, some 252 million years ago) and the ongoing sixth. By contrast, invasive species thrived. A few stowaway ants and cockroaches, brought in via construction materials or soil, multiplied into rampaging swarms, including the ‘crazy ant’ (Paratrechina longicornis), which soon replaced all eleven ant species that had been carefully selected to cycle nutrients and disperse seeds.¹² Unchecked algal growth strangled the ocean, so that the world’s largest captive coral reef had to be cleaned by hand. Bass and Allen’s walled Eden had become a small, dying world.

The most important lesson salvaged from the wreckage of Biosphere 2 is the impossibility of controlling ecological systems even of a modest size. Shortly after the second mission, scientists argued in Science that the experiment made clear ‘no one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free … Despite its mysteries and hazards, Earth remains the only known home that can sustain life.’¹³ Yet it seems that few have learned from Bass and Allen’s folly. Neoliberals and their fellow travellers on the political centre and Left keenly support geoengineering as a solution to the climate crisis, as if the Earth system could be controlled like a thermostat. The ‘Sixth Extinction’, which will likely lead to the extermination of half of all animal and plant species by the end of the century, seems to bother few outside of the tiny conservation movement.¹⁴ Yet according to leading ecologists, it is arguably ‘the most serious environmental problem’, because of its irreversibility and impact on hyper-complex ecological systems.¹⁵ Furthermore, the experience of Biosphere 2 discredits the popular approach of pricing ‘ecosystem services’, which have been valued at $125 trillion globally.¹⁶ Instead of Oscar Wilde’s cynic, it seems that it is now the naive environmentalist who ‘knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing’.¹⁷ If $200 million couldn’t keep eight people alive in an ecosystem the size of two football pitches, how much is the world worth?

In this chapter we attempt to establish a system of thought fit for an age of environmental catastrophe. We begin by asking: What can we know? To what degree do we understand nature? What are the consequences of our ignorance, both to ourselves and to the natural world? These questions are similar to those posed by Friedrich Hayek about the economy in the 1930s and 1940s, in his effort to re-found liberalism as neoliberalism. By arguing that humanity could never comprehend the market, he endowed the economic sphere with ecological attributes – it appeared as a natural self-organizing system. We follow his example of digging deep into the epistemic layers of our beliefs, but whereas Hayek covered the market with the veil of ignorance, we drape that veil over nature. But what are the social, economic, and political implications of the impossibility of fully knowing nature? To answer this question, we take leave of 1990s Arizona and travel across the Atlantic Ocean and back two centuries to trace the origins of modern environmental thought.

The Battle of Dorking

Most of the epistemological frameworks for understanding the present environmental crisis can be traced back to one of three works written in 1798. Given the tumult of that era, this was not a particularly conspicuous year. Napoleon Bonaparte was busy fighting a fruitless campaign in Egypt and still a year from his coup d’état; the Haitian Revolution was only halfway through its thirteen-year duration; and it wasn’t until 1800 that Alessandro Volta invented the battery. Yet, tucked between the folds of these better-known events, G. W. F. Hegel, Thomas Malthus, and Edward Jenner wrote texts that would in time come to define the three main environmental paradigms. Hegel’s ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’ was a personal essay in which he reflected on his recent reading in theology and political economy. Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous text of the three, has enjoyed a lasting influence on economics, demography, and population ecology. By contrast, Jenner had to self-publish An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ vaccinæ because no one else would disseminate his findings from experiments on the smallpox vaccine. We see these three texts as belonging to an unspoken debate over the knowability of nature. Each of these thinkers is a primogenitor of one of the three great lineages in environmental thought: Hegel’s Prometheanism, Malthusianism, and Jennerite ecological scepticism.

Before these men shaped the lineaments of environmental thought, they were swayed by the storm that was the French Revolution. Hegel, who is largely remembered as the grand old man of the conservative Prussian academy, was a radical student in his youth. One can find ‘Vive la liberté!!’ scrawled in his yearbook from the University at Tübingen.¹⁸ Meanwhile, Malthus’ Essay immediately elevated him from obscurity as a parson in Dorking to fame and infamy, as well as giving him the first chair in political economy (at a college run by the East India Company). Despite his radical upbringing – his father had greatly admired Rousseau – Malthus wrote his Essay with the conservative hope of deflecting the ‘blazing comet’ of the French Revolution before it ‘destroy[ed] the shrinking inhabitants of the earth’.¹⁹ Jenner’s pamphlet on his smallpox vaccine gained traction in 1799, when the French Wars sparked an outbreak of the ‘speckled monster’ in Britain.²⁰

‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’ is one of Hegel’s lesser-known works, but it is vital for our purposes. This is because it introduces his as yet unnamed concept of ‘the humanization of nature’ (die Humanisierung der Natur) for the first time – an idea that would animate much of his philosophical oeuvre, from The Phenomenology of Spirit to Lectures on Aesthetics.²¹ The humanization of nature is the process by which humanity overcomes its alienation from nature by instilling the latter with human consciousness through the process of labour – transforming wilderness into a garden. Human labour is nature acting upon itself so it can become self-conscious, or, as Hegel puts it in the Encyclopedia, ‘The goal of Nature is to destroy itself and to break through its husk of immediate, sensuous existence, to consume itself like the phoenix in order to come forth from this externality rejuvenated as spirit.’²² On this basis, Hegel and his heirs fostered the belief that the domination of nature was both feasible and historically necessary.

In ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’, Hegel grounds this concept in the biblical past. Between the Fall and the Flood, an era of which only ‘a few dim traces have been preserved to us’, humans struggled to ‘revert from barbarism’ and return to a state of grace by restoring their ‘unity’ with nature.²³ Nature rebuffed such efforts with the Flood, leaving humanity with three choices, each represented by a biblical figure.²⁴ Noah rebuilt the world through divine law, which controlled violence among people as well as violence between humanity and nature.²⁵ Rejecting this juridical peace, Nimrod subdued both people and nature to his will: ‘He defended himself against water by walls; he was a hunter and a king.’²⁶ Abraham rejected Noah and Nimrod’s social contracts because he aspired instead to be independent of nature and society. By avoiding settlements and opting for herding over farming, Abraham was ‘a stranger on earth, a strang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Binding Prometheus
• 2. A New Republic
• 3. Planning Half-Earth
• 4. News from 2047
• Epilogue: An Epoch of Rest
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix
• Notes