Son[i]a #383 Troy Vettese
- 00:01 Learning to see. Seeing the world differently
- 06:04 Neoliberals have a quite sophisticated philosophy
- 08:00 The Socialist calculation debate
- 11:18 Otto Neurath has been forgotten by the left
- 12:54 Many of the early socialist were vegetarians
- 14:05 Planning a global economy is going to be harder than eating lentils for dinner
- 19:18 An unsexy topic: many of our environmental problems have animals and agriculture as the main cause.
- 21:59 Problematising lab meat, health veganism and conservationists
- 26:07 I write about neoliberals because I was a young tory
- 31:40 Half-earth socialism as in Vegan Communism: scenario planning of the inmediate future
- 35:17 A marxist utopia: having a good life, art and companionship
- 36:59 Scenario planning
- 40:26 Writing as a way of dealing with ecological grief and feelings of impotence
- 42:01 You have to understand the enemy
- 46:04 The Commons
- 50:25 The bad past of conservationists
- 56:30 Land scarcity
- 59:19 Conservation... in the Global North. Reconsidering land use, meat eating, energy quotas and rewilding
- 61:38 The absurdity of the eco-modernists arguments: the earth is not bouncing back!
- 65:57 The left needs to have its own utopia
- 68:27 Creating coalitions
- 73:06 Utopia: a good place and a no-place
- 76:09 It's gonna be a brutal fight
- 79:05 There's still no alternative to capitalism, but socialism
- 84:31 The spark bird
Troy Vettese is an environmental historian, researcher and writer. In his texts—published in journals such as Bookforum, New Left Review, The Guardian, Jacobin, n+1 and Salvage—, he discusses the need to dismantle the world we have created in order to make the earth-system more stable. In doing so, he weaves together knowledge from environmental economics, animal studies, a critique of the neoliberal system and the history of energy. His book Half-Earth Socialism, co-authored with Drew Pendergrass, reactivates the imaginary of the left and of environmental movements by outlining possible strategies to defend life on the planet.
In this podcast we talk to Troy Vettese about veganism, ecology and geoengineering and about neoliberalism and the environmental crisis. We look at past examples of vegan socialist experiences and understand the urgency of including animal rights in radical thought. We also examine the tension between nature and the market, accepting the impossibility of dealing with the climate crisis through eco-modernist techno-solutions. Troy Vettese speaks about golf and birds, and about fiction as a necessary space in which to imagine futures: literature for thinking by planning and charting new horizons.