Half-Earth Socialism - Troy Vettese - Sentientism Ep:191

Troy Vettese is an environmental historian who specializes in environmental economics, animal studies, and energy history. In 2019 he completed his doctorate in history at New York University. From 2019 to 2021, he worked at Harvard University as a William Lyon Mackenzie King postdoctoral research fellow. He has collaborated with Drew Pendergrass, an environmental engineer, on numerous projects including their book Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics.
Troy is currently revising his dissertation on neoliberal environmental thought into a book, tentatively titled 'Beyond Externality'. In addition to his academic work, he writes on a wide array of environmental topics for a popular audience, and has had essays published in the Guardian, the New Statesman, Jacobin, N+1, Book Forum, and Boston Review.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: apple.co/391khQO & anchor.fm/sentientism.
00:00 Clips!
01:04 Welcome
02:58 Troy's Intro
- Half-Earth Socialism "what does it look like to have an ecologically stable society... a good relationship with other beings on this planet and also to ensure a good life for everyone"
- The Half-Earth Socialism computer game & maybe a future board-game
05:44 What's Real?
- #Ecosocialism and #neoliberalism in conversation with each other
- Growing up in a fairly conservative but non-religious household
- Being a Young Tory, reading Milton Friedman
- In early 20's "a crisis of faith in terms of this conservative worldview" due to the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis
- Reading Marx and New Left Review
- Exploring the environmental crisis
- A sensitive child, then a toxic masculinity phase as a teenager (callous, eating meat, machismo), then, alongside the crisis of faith in conservatism, a wish to return to childhood passion for nature
- Gravitating towards ecosocialism
- Didn't "grow up with red diapers" (being brought up in a left wing family) so feeling inoculated as knows the political right very well as "I came from the right to the left"
- #greenwashing measures "I wanted to understand where these ideas had come from... no one had done an intellectual history of these things"
- Challenging the common leftist view that the right & neoliberalism doesn't have any real intellectual depth "I took it more seriously than most socialists"
- "I thought the left should have more concrete ideas of their own... match the rigour of these conservative ones"
- "'We'll figure it out after the revolution'... that's not enough"
- Mother who ran for the Green party in elections
- Not religious now
- "Sceptical of thinking that there's one true path... one true way of relating to each other or to animals"... relativism, Kuhnian (paradigms)?
- The neoliberal view of the market as the optimal information processor
- Being rational but also appreciating the spiritual/subliminal/subjective? "that's why I'm a big bird watcher"
- The "spark bird" that gets you into #birdwatching
- #deleuze "Becoming animal" vs. #Haraway's notion of "becoming with"
- "This planet is pretty crazy... full of life... we just get used to it... get jaded... these moments when you really see how wonderful existence is"
17:50 What & Who Matters?
- "People only change their minds when the cracks are starting to appear and they're looking for something else"
- Seeing neoliberal policies of privatisation & lower taxes "I'm not sure if that is actually working"
- Knowing some vegetarians & arguing against them to defend meat-eating "I always felt dissatisfied with my own efforts"
- "Marxists tend to be pretty bad at ethics"
- "I want to scold other Marxists for being so bad about the animal question"
- "Every creature including humans wants to engage in certain behaviours"
- "Humans have this Hegelian quality where they want to see themselves in the world"
- "The problem with #capitalism is... it's not our own ideas... it's capital... we're doing things we don't care about... no one is in control of this process... the human race is being subordinated to the ends of this non-human intangible thing we call capital"
- Also an "intense attention to empathy... caring about the species being of other creatures"
27:33 Who Matters?
54:15 A Better World?
01:29:55 Follow Troy
- www.versobooks.com/en-gb/prod...
- www.half.earth/
& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes)#sentientism
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[@Sentientism]

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[@LouisGedo]

Looking forward to this discussion

[@Sentientism]

Thanks Louis - hope you find it interesting!

[@efortunywhitton]

Excellent discussion; thank you! Very good reflections on the short-comings of both sides within left/right. #Rewild at least 50% of our planet: 100% agree; at least this much/minimum. 🙂

[@CDAActivism]

1st 💪🏾 💪🏾 💪🏾

[@ReverendDr.Thomas]

Good Girl!

[@Sentientism]

I feel like a proper UA-camr now :)