“Half-Earth Socialism”: A Plan to Save the Future – Interview with Dr. Troy Vettese (vegan), Part 1 of 2

Dr. Troy Vettese (vegan) is a Canadian environmental historian whose research delves into environmental economics, energy systems, and the influence of capitalism on animal-people life. Together with American environmental engineer Drew Pendergrass (vegan), he is the co-author of “Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics,” which has been described as a vegan socialist manifesto. “When I say we want to have more practical solutions to the environmental crisis, it means: What do we actually need to do to get over the crisis? And we have to look at the whole world and the economy and think about what are the trade-offs we’re willing to make.” “We wrote this book, and we made a video game which people can also play, and they can play as a planetary planner in their own right, to make these decisions as well, and begin to think about these whole Earth challenges.”

“One thing that’s important is reviving a tradition where, 200 years ago, most utopian socialists, such as Percy Shelley, or Robert Owen, and Henry Salt, and many other people who were the original activists and theorists of socialism, many of them were vegetarian. They saw it as natural to want to liberate humanity and liberate the animal world.” “The second thing would be where veganism and animal rights emerges from the analysis. My co-author actually made a linear model where you can basically do this very easily. Are people vegetarian, vegan, or omnivores, and so on. And once you begin to have this kind of analysis, you realize that the livestock industry makes everything else harder. The livestock industry uses up a huge amount of land, about 40% of the inhabitable world. It’s four billion hectares of land, the size of four United States, or four Canadas, and it doesn’t produce that much food considering how much land it takes up. So, if we actually get rid of this industry, then we’re able to have a lot of space for our other goals, such as decarbonization, and dealing with extinction, and so forth.”