Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics

One of the great paradoxes of thinking on the Left is the bad reputation that utopias have, not helped by Engels’ early 1880 <i>Socialism: Utopian and Scientific</i> – a quite reasonable critique of a whole bunch of writers who had a vision of socialism but no real large scale vision of how to get there. This isn’t to say the Marx &amp; Engels had no utopia in mind – they clearly did, laying it out some of the early work. Yet later ‘scientific’ socialists turned into reductionists and crude empiricists who got pretty good at analysis, messed up much of the practice and rather lost sight of where we are going. I see the same logic in those on the Left who write off fiction and utopian writing as a diversion from the ‘real’ struggle (and in doing so lose sight of a vision so become reactive and conserving). Instead, fiction and utopian writing are essential for building understanding of Others and for imagining and trying out ideas about where it is we might be going. All too often I see these discarded because they don’t fit how our models tell us the world works.<br /><br />Despite all its empiricism, this engaging, frustrating, invigorating and in places downright annoying book is just the kind of utopian thinking we need on the Left – not because it is right (Vettesse and Pendergrass pretty much admit it probably is not), but because it tries to imagine the detail of what a sustainable world might look like, and the sort of ways we might manage that world to keep it going. That is to say, it’s a classic sort of thought experiment, where they make some assumptions and then see where they go. At the heart of their conjecturing lie two things: first that the efforts humans have made to control the global environment (nature) are flawed not in the execution but in the very uncontrollability of such a complex system, and second that much of what passes for socialist economic planning makes the same assumption as most other forms of economic thinking and works as there is a single measure that allows all thing to be easily compared. That is to say, they criticise both capitalist economics and socialist planning for treating price as the straightforward encapsulation of everything that allows all things to be compared. <br /><br />The argument is, as befits such utopian vision-making, unconventional. First, they explore models of human engagements with the environment through consideration of works by Hegel, Malthus and Edward Jenner each of which proposes a different approach to what they call ‘the knowability of nature’, which they link to the problem of economic planning, indeed economic models, to argue that they are simply too complex to be knowable in detail. The kicker is that they argue that we can build models at a higher level, so detailed modelling may be impossible but global modelling may be possible – and they try to build some. Second they draw on ideas about algorithms linked to linear programming and <i>in natura</i> economic modelling written out of socialist economics to suggest there are viable alternatives to the current approaches. The case, their model, turns on some assumptions and one overarching presumption, which is that to be sustainable the way we live in the world needs to be constrained, and requires a form of socialist democracy. It is this latter assumption that allows their modelling to work, because once the overall constraints are identified and agreed, those best placed to make specific decisions are those whose local knowledge knows what works best given local conditions, within the overall systemic constraints. What’s more, despite the technical complexity suggested by what they are talking about, the case is clear, lucid and assumes no computing or mathematic knowledge. <br /><br />In his fabulous <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8069695-envisioning-real-utopias" rel="nofollow noopener"> <i>Envisioning Real Utopias</i> </a> project Erik Olin Wright reminded us that the tasks of an emancipatory social science are three fold: systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists, envisioning viable alternatives, and understanding the dilemmas, possibilities and obstacles associated with transformation. This piece of utopian thinking does what much of the Left leaves out of this task – envisioning viable alternatives. The second part of Wright’s approach looked to those alternatives and asked the extent to which they were desirable (is it a utopia we’d like to be in?), viable (is it a meaningful goal that can be put into practice?) and achievable (do and can the conditions exist for them to be brought about?). <br /><br />Vettese and Pendergrass are strongest on the viability question, although their fictional creations of what this world might look like, modelled as a piece of writing on William Morris’s 1890 novel <i>News From Nowhere</i>, posits a pretty good and rewarding life, invoking Marx in <i>The German Ideology</i> that it could be possible “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner … without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”. Yet this is where some of the frustration lies, in that the achieveability question is left, for the most part skipped over, except that trying to humanise nature (and therefore relying on geoengineering as a solution) is not the way to go while the social movement needs to better draw in scientists – although to be fair, this is a plan, not necessarily a path to that plan.<br /><br />This, then, does what good utopian writing should do: it allows us to consider what a better future might look like. What’s better is that Vettesse and Pendergrass have sufficient technical skills to not only build the computer systems that allow that planned future to be explored, but have done so in a way that we have on-line access to their systems and join in, making different assumptions to see what happens. It’s probably not <i>the</i> answer, it might not even be <i>an</i> answer but it is an attempt at one that gets beyond the technocratic reductionism of much that passes for economic and environmental assessments on the Left, let alone the Right. That makes it worth our while as something that is good to think with.

<br />I don't think I am able to rate this book. Why so? Because one of my key principles is to separate the book from the concept/technology it describes. So e.g. if the technology is excellent, but the book is terrible, I rate it as bad. And the other way around. But in this case ... the ideas presented in this book ... are so abysmally, incredibly wrong that I don't think I could separate that from the overall judgment...<br /><br />First of all, why did I read this book - a book about socialism? Because of my recent visit in Edinburgh... I enjoyed the beautiful city, its landscapes, and all the historical places, but one day, when I was passing by the fence of the university of E., I've seen a series of posters - invitations for passers-by to attend the meet-up of local ... Marxists. My jaw has dropped nearly to the ground - as someone from a former communist country, I have a very clear and categorical standpoint when it comes to communists, Marxists, and radical socialists. The memories are still fresh, they are being passed gen to gen, taught at school - basically, NEVER AGAIN.<br /><br />But people from the so-called Western World have never experienced those atrocities - and apparently, young idealists want to "fix" the world using the concepts introduced by long-dead red comrades ... Scary shit. And then I spotted "Half-Earth Socialism" - the book which promises to solve the most pressing issues of today's Earth by ... turning half of the Earth (involuntarily, by revolution(s) led by socialist activists) into a giant kolkhoz. It sounds so-so-so-so horrible that I simply had to read it. It took me just three sessions and I'm really scared.<br /><br />I'm not going through everything that you can find in the book. I don't think I can find the strength/motivation to do so. Let me summarize my key thoughts only:<br />* there are plenty of claims, but NONE of them is based on facts/references to the source - there are just radical opinions peppered with emotional statements<br />* people who have written this book advocate the model that has failed miserably, but they don't address any reasons WHY it (communism) has failed (except mentioning prometheism as a wrong direction) - what does that say about their thought process?<br />* they claim that small-scale experiments (of self-sustained environments) didn't work, so they advocate for a "big bang deployment": no room for experimentation, no room for empirical tests, no feedback mechanism; they want to change the planet this way, how does that even sound?<br />* they bring in Havana and Soviet cyberneticists as sources of inspiration and good patterns for replication - initially, I thought it was a joke<br />* they convince the reader that central planning (on the level of the planet) is possible (!) with the usage of linear programming (!) - they don't have a basic understanding of ANY theory of complexity<br />* they appear not to understand the primary human motivations: honestly, they claim that you can convince people to perform the shittest jobs by giving them additional vacations in centrally managed resorts; is this some KIND OF JOKE?!<br />* the section about replacing money with something unclear and that later you can just "simply" request a replacement for something that has broken ... this isn't even funny<br /><br />The theories in this book are harmful. Idiotic. Ridiculous. They have nothing in common with reason, science, and understanding of human nature. At least a few times, I thought this book is a joke, prank, or some sort of performance. But apparently, this is not the case. This is poison. Avoid.<br /><br />Marking it with 1 star, so everyone avoids this cesspool.

A recent tweet from the co-author nicely sums up the stance that Half-Earth Socialism is up against. "Why are there so many 'ecosocialists' who hate animals?" It can be hard to be a socialist and an environmentalist at the same time in terms of knowing what exactly to do with one's sentimentality. On the one hand socialism requires a certain kind of irreverence, a sweeping, critical militancy always on the lookout for moralism as cover for base material interests. On the one-hand is the sandal-wearing, deep earth ecology which draws strength from a spiritual ethics of care. These two attitudes have butted heads as much in theoretical debates of Victoria-era England as in the drudging DSA committee meetings of today. It is clear that Troy and Drew are intimately aware with this seeming contradiction, and try their hand at an affective-aufhebung by using the best tools of both political traditions: empirical data and utopian dreaming.<br />They do this, in part, by asking two parallel questions: what would an ecological socialism look like without recourse to the tricks of Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism, and what would a socialist ecology look like without recourse to the illusions of apolitical half-measures and bourgeois patronage. What if a socialist project was structured around values like self-abnegation, thrift, and epistemic modesty? What if an ecological blueprint required many of the cliches of actually existing socialism: quotas, shortages, and the endless centrality of politics in its most basic form: the art of who gets what, when, how. Rather than defer the unappetizing hard truths of socialist efficiency or ecological limits, Troy and Drew acknowledge bravely that as things stand now, there is no way to have our cake and eat it too. Without using any of the cheap tricks of “net-zero emissions” or techno-utopianism, they spell out clearly what it would take to live within our planetary means *right now*. If critics of the book dismiss mandatory veganism and a 10-fold energy reduction for Americans while the global south gets to double theirs as political non-starters, they are welcome to offer an accounting in which exurban-dwellers get to keep driving their electrified dick-head trucks to buy Costco T-bones on the free market, but mind you *without* using any accounting tricks like direct-air capture or cold fusion. In this regard, they share all of Vaclav Smil’s realism, with none of his distaste for its political implications.<br />But if they’ve done the math, they’ve also done the dreaming. The closing chapter offers a fictional glance at their Utopian vision of half-earth socialism, a world in which we bike through tomato fields to the district labor sub-committee. If the empirical polemics of the first part of the book is meant to shake ecologists out of their magical thinking and convince them of the necessity for an economy based on a democratically planned economy, the utopian section offer socialists a version of partisan sentimentality: not everyone who wants to continue to share planet with birds and wolves is a neo-liberal shill. As it turns out, empirical modesty and economic thrift are values that are not key to ecological conservation, but may well form the basis of socialist democratic practice as well. The book beautifully weds, according to my own aesthetic-political preferences, the ecological and the socialist according to Gramsci’s maxim: "La sfida della modernità è vivere senza illusioni e senza diventare disilluso." <br />

The recently published IPCC Report puts this book in earth-shattering context. (both literally and figuratively). The Authors present what I suppose would be called four main ideas to put forth the idea of half earth socialism. I have to, in my very, average-ish person understanding, give props to them for coming up with these ideas, and for encouraging in their own way, radical thinking on how to save the earth from climate catastrophe.<br /><br />As it happens with almost any other book, there were things that I did not agree with or those that did not make sense to me, but then reading is not for the purposes of reinforcing one's own thought processes. <br /><br />I would certainly encourage people to read this book, partly for the ideas the authors present, and partly with the hope that it triggers thoughts amongst its readers, from where we may discover another novel idea which we can set into action, and attempt to, despite a large portions of our own people acting in defiance and in contravention to well-established science and facts, yes, facts that are plain as day.

"Half Earth Socialism" presents a utopian vision for a more sustainable world. I’ve always felt that we need the voices of dreamers in our midst. It’s dreamers who shake us out of our lethargy and help us to envision new ways of tackling stubborn problems.<br /><br />“Half-Earth Socialism” attempts to continue the tradition of the dreamers by envisioning an earthly utopia where each of us live in harmony with nature. The waste and greed of capitalism have been tempered and there is enough for everyone on the planet to escape the ravages of poverty. <br /><br />This idea of “half earth” got its start with the famous biologist, EO Wilson. He envisioned healing the ravages of the Anthropocene by re-wilding half the earth.<br /><br />In “Half Earth Socialism” the authors attempt to help us imagine just how the goal of half earth and a sustainable planet could become a reality. They also create an allegory to help us imagine the daily rhythms of such a life.<br /><br />Unfortunately, this book doesn’t inspire us to dream. The logic of the authors’ thinking is so flawed that it exacerbates existing feelings of an impending planetary melt down.<br /><br />The problem is the authors can’t quite make up their mind on a path to follow, so they flip back and forth between two diametrically opposed strategies, thus making their entire premise implausible. They advocate:<br /><br />-Dialing back capitalism so we harm the planet less<br />-Powering forward with advanced technology<br /><br />This book needs to pick a lane. Are we going with Walden pond or a super tech future? We can’t do both.<br /><br />The authors primarily advocate simplification. This would mean things like: <br /><br />-Worldwide public transportation instead of personal vehicles<br />-Veganism instead of steaks and processed food<br />-Simpler pleasures like family and friends, not world travel and wide screen TVs<br /><br />They lay out a vision of what this would look like for each of the major consumption areas: food, transportation, energy, etc. Their vision of the future necessitates technological advances that will require unprecedented levels of energy consumption, advanced computer innovation, and resource mobilization. <br /><br />For example:<br /><br />-In order to live a vegan life, the planet must eliminate meat and replace it with a major industry cranking out plant-based meat replacements. <br />-In order to eliminate nuclear power, we should radically advance energy technology, and create vast wind and solar farms. <br />-In order to create resource equity, we need to create a political system where rich people voluntarily dial back their yachts and villas, and agree to live modestly in dormitories with others.<br /><br />In other words, the way to achieve a simple, more sustainable world is to innovate wildly advanced technology. The flawed reasoning: simplicity will be achieved through creation of complicated systems. So the next thirty years need to look like this: as global warming spurs worldwide environmental crises, drowning cities, and wild fires, the world needs to not get rattled. It needs to achieve unparalleled technological advancement, all the while cooperating in ways unprecedented in human history. <br /><br />Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy a hopeful utopian vision of the future. It provides us with a break from the doom scrolling that tends to pervade our lives. All of us are in bad need of just a sliver of hope in order to combat the environmental armageddon story. But in order for a utopian vision to be inspirational, it must have a basic level of viability. <br /><br />I feel this book’s reasoning is so flawed that it exacerbates the problem. After reading it, I feel as if the problems are more insurmountable than ever. No one has the future of climate change figured out, but if environmental storytellers hope to inspire us to think in new ways, their tales must have at least a minimum level of plausibility.

Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass’s “Half-Earth Socialism” centers on the premise that environmentalists (and also the left more broadly) must re-embrace a lost utopianism, especially in a world where dystopian scenarios become ever more likely. If we want to actually avoid disaster, not merely slow or mitigate it, then we need a positive, compelling vision of what the future could look like. The dominant neoliberal paradigm may be wrong in its assessment of the problem and proposal of solutions, but it is easy to understand and to apply. And so must an alternative. <br /><br />If we are to design such utopians, we must understand what is malleable about our current situations. Their first chapter analyzes three strains of environmental thought: Prometheanism, Malthusianism, and ecological skepticism. Each strain has a different answer to the question of “what can be controlled?” Nature, demography, of the economy. The Promethean belief that humans can bend nature toward our will isn’t just present in the dominant neoliberalism but also very essential to Marxist theory. The authors argue that you can’t just green Marx by reading Capital with green-tinted glasses; Marxists share the neoliberal view of capital as an unconscious, all-powerful force—just abhorring it instead of celebrating it. The belief that nature can be controlled is a folly, and a possibly dangerous one at that. Recounting the fiasco of Biosphere 2, they note, “The most important story from the wreckage of Biosphere 2 is the impossibility of controlling ecological systems of even a modest size.” If we can’t even control that, what makes us think that we can successfully embark on geoengineering on large scale? <br /><br />They are similarly critical of the Malthusian strain in environmentalism, which focuses on the expansion of the human presence on earth as the main driver of environmental degradation. “There are different variants of Malthusianism,” they write,” but often little separates the genocidal from the respectable strains.” <br /><br />They place greater faith in an ecological skepticism (a strain of thought never directly fleshed out like the more commonly known one, but reflecting a belief that our disturbances of nature can have unforeseen ripple effects and that our fore-knowledge is thus inherently constrained) that they trace back to Edward Jenner, who traced the rise of new disease strains to the domestication of animals. Since animal agriculture is a choice when it comes to the social order, we can, of course, choose differently. The authors similarly revisit some of the discussions in Plato’s Republic about the social order and the food system: once you introduce animal husbandry into your ideal society, the demands for land grow (you need grazing land, and the land to grow food for the livestock), and things get ever more complex. <br /><br />Such insights invite us to reflect on the underlying organization of society, and proffered solutions, which they deride as “demi-utopias,” posit a greener future by leaving those organizations intact. Thea idea of bioenergy carbon capture and sequestration sounds great on paper, but if its ever growing demand for land is held to planetary boundaries, it suddenly accomplishes quite little. An increasing faction of the environmental community has been embracing nuclear power as a near-panacea, but the scaling up of nuclear power to what it would need to be to reach climate goals is daunting—amplifying underlying risks. Similarly, “half-Earth” proposals that leave the underlying system intact have often led to a neocolonialism that props up racist and dictatorial regimes. A “half-Earth” without a movement behind it can quickly become dystopian. <br /><br />Yes, to the “half-Earth,” the authors say—as we need to preserve the earth’s natural systems of carbon capture and sequestration, but make it socialist. Their “half-Earth socialism” seeks to prevent the Sixth Extinction, practice “natural geoengineering” (with rewilding as an example), and create a fully renewable energy system. This is not without its tradeoffs. The authors are quite clear that a fully renewable energy system will have a much higher need for land, hence the book’s frequent championing of veganism. Such a system also needs energy quotas, which they argue should be designed to allow growth in the developing world along with sharp cuts in rich countries. <br /><br />Such a future has many tradeoffs, and we need to address them democratically. The latter chapters of the book focus on a rediscovery of forgotten strains of socialist planning that were more democratic than the dominant Soviet model and also create space for an economic order that doesn’t reduce everything to money, and the authors sketch out a chapter evocative of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” Their fictional sketch future seems limited in its audience to an academic crowd (the protagonist was having a lively debate with colleagues and friends hailing from different strains of socialist thought the night before), and a full-fledged utopian vision will take more than a chapter. The reader is left with many questions (such as what global or even regional connectivity looks like, given the minimal references to communications technology and a possibly dystopian mention of people needing formal governmental approval of long-distance travel; or what the city looks like), but the value of such sketches are in the questions they raise more than the answers they provide. <br /><br />When talking about utopias, the question always becomes, how do we get from here to there? Utopian dreams are fun; utopian realities are better. Vettese and Pendergrass insist on the need for the heterogeneous movements of the left to unite around a shared agenda: indigenous, feminist, labor, animal rights, climate. Throughout the book, they emphasize that the marriage of science and social movements is a potent one. Science disconnected from social movements can easily end up with hubris or authoritarianism. Social movements disconnected from science can end up self-defeating or aimless. <br />

I found a book that fulfills two of my biggest dreams: First, the authors move beyond a critique of the current fossil fuel based socio-metabolic regime and embark on a thought experiment of a degrowth utopia (and I really appreciate the idea that we don’t just all move into a hippie commune and grow our own vegetables which would be undesirable for me personally and impossible in terms of land use anyway). Secondly, instead of a ‘Promethean’ approach to dealing with climate issues on the left which falsely promises fully automated luxury communism to us but in that same moment denies the existence of planetary boundaries, the book discusses real trade offs between energy, land use, and biodiversity. These are difficult to discuss because it’s unlikely to find a win-win solution for all. <br /><br />It’s refreshing to read this easily digestible, mere 200 pages long piece where everyone starts off by agreeing that capitalism is the culprit of climate change. The profit motive currently guiding production and investment decisions and the imperial mode of living in the so-called Global North drive us into climate armaggeddon and, unless we change this underlying logic, we are probably doomed. Climate engineers and conservatives alike which promise to save us with the help of BECCS or solar geoengineering are ultimately interested in holding up the current economic system in which they have vested interests and advantages they aim to preserve at the cost of basically everyone else. I myself started my career as a geoengineering hater a couple of years ago, and this book was therefore comfort food for me.<br /><br />By the way, both degrowth and geoengineering have made it into the IPCC report. So interesting timing for this book!<br /><br />I found the idea behind half earth socialism very intriguing. Calculating different socialist plans based on linear programming, cybernetics, and a kind of in natura calculation fed with climate science data does make sense to me and motivates me to go further into this and understand it better. For now, I’ve played the Half Earth online game and you should too, it’s good craic.<br /><br />There’s some things I disagree with. The authors claim that electricity comprises only a small part of total energy use, but I would disagree. It is also stated that hydroelectricity and geothermal energy won’t play a big role compared to wind and solar power in a half earth socialist future and I wonder why that is. What was really a bit weird was the statement that the anti nuclear movement was so all-encompassing in the past which I doubt was really the case.<br /><br />And lastly, the book avoids the question of political feasibility. Not only does the eco socialist revolution which mark the starting point of the half earth socialist utopia seem far away, but also a global system of governance based on the aforementioned mathematical tools appears extremely unlikely. It makes absolute sense to restrict this discussion in the book to the very correct assertion that the alternative might be something like a global climate catastrophe. And I would not criticise the book because of that. There is no general blueprint for changing power structures. But, as one friend of mine said to me once, if we think about solutions to the climate crisis in the framework of political feasibility at the moment, we can also just give up right away.

The subtitle calling this book a "plan" isn't really accurate. It's more a "vision." I have nothing against visions, and as visions go, this one isn't so far off from mine. If we don't consider radical solutions and if we aren't prepared to try some of them, we may miss out on the best opportunities for saving our planet. I'm fine with the idea of taking strong action to slow climate change, even if it requires me to cut back on my lifestyle. I do think that a more collectivist society would be a good thing and that it would help us to combat both climate change and social ills such as vast inequality of wealth and political polarization. I agree that treating money as the measure of all things is an error that cuts the human heart out of society. And I agree that the computer science of today could be harnessed for far more effective economic planning than the Soviets were ever able to manage so that a partially planned economy should not be casually dismissed. But Mr. Vettese does not chart a pathway that I think can or should be followed to pursue this vision.<br /><br />Mr. Vettese is very good at explaining why other people's schemes for combatting climate change won't work. He's right that there are problems with massive deployment of biofuels and nuclear energy. He's right that most schemes for geoengineering our way out of climate change are as likely to cause problems as to solve them. I don't think that universal veganism is the answer, but I acknowledge that our current relationship with food animals and industrial agriculture causes problems of environmental damage, pandemics and ethical issues that need to be addressed. And he's right that neoliberalism is filled with contradictions that make it unworkable as a long-term program, but then he is blind to the contradictions in his own program, which he seems to be saying he doesn't have to worry about since he is admittedly utopian in his approach. I'm afraid that's a double standard that doesn't work for me.<br /><br />For a utopian view of the future in the struggle against climate change that is much more workable, read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future. Mr. Robinson suggests that perhaps we can find our way through to a better future through a variety of actions, ranging from moral authority and leadership in government to changes in social attitudes to some semi-sanctioned ecoterrorism plus a limited amount of geoengineering. I'm not so sure that Mr. Robinson's program will work in the end of the day, but the utopian vision of his book left me with a feeling of hope and possibility, while this one left me shaking my head.

I'd give 3.5 if I could. It was better than I expected going in as someone with what I, of course, view as a justified bias against certain kinds of degrowth arguments to which anything "half earth" brings to mind. At its best the book is a playful account of the limits of certain kinds of ecomodernist socialism without exactly naming it as such and some interesting visions for a pragmatically, equitable green future. At its worst it's an idealist democratic socialist cybernetics. I really appreciate the Morris adaptation chapter and it could just be its own novella like News From Nowhere. Also it has probably the strongest left critique of nuclear power I've read. However, I think there's a reason Marx cautioned against creating cookbooks for the future. <br /><br />So ... I have two gripes, and I don't wanna turn this into a real review that could be published somewhere, but here goes. <br /><br />The first is a discomfort in the lack of critically around the concept of rewilding, which has a very long tradition of critique and it's not even something I study. In turn, the ways in which Indigenous peoples, movements, and theory appear as footnotes, afterthoughts, or rejoinders is also troubling. When positing a diverse future that hopes to address the limits of certain Promethean/orthodox Marxisms by positing a "Half-Earth coalition," one's coalition, frankly, needs to be wider than "animal-rights activists and organic farmers", "as well as socialists, feminists, and scientists." That sounds like a crew you'd find at any XR demo down the street.<br /><br />As an especially irksome point, the only other time I've read that Indigenous peoples should lead in the plans for their lands (the authors are writing from Massachusetts and Harvard in particular) "wherever possible" is in oil company promotional materials. Who is this conservationist force deciding the conditions of possibility for what's "possible" "wherever"? Here I think some positioning from the authors could go far.<br /><br />The second is that at a certain level what's being promoted here, a kind of democratic socialist cybernetics, sounds like it follows the same circuitry as the left accelerationism the authors critique, just with the master volume dialled down from 11 to 5 or 3 where low-level tech-bro frequencies somehow cut through the mix.<br /><br />All that said, it's a well-rounded, crisp intro to tensions within contemporary ecosocialist thought and has interesting, ambitious speculative thinking that has strong pedagogical value, especially with the game that accompanies the book.

I want it all