--- > Such experiences contrasted sharply with SRM’s impacts in the core capitalist states, where quotidian life continued more or less as normal save for the nearly permanent overcast weather. Even then, many saw blue skies as an inevitable casualty of modernity, much like electrification’s extinction of starry nights a century before. --- > American unilateralism in SRM research dated back to the late 2010s, when a coalition of African and low-lying island nations repeatedly tried to bring SRM under an international authority, such as the UN Environment Programme or the Montreal Protocol (a treaty which protects the ozone layer). The US had vetoed these motions to keep SRM unregulated; geoengineering, it seems, had always been a form of planetary class war. --- > The whole premise of ‘green capitalism’ was that environmentalists would only make minimal demands of firms and consumers in order to gain their support – but how could the world’s greatest problem be solved by such modest means? --- > The market could sell both the poison and its antidote, but it cared little about the right ratio of the two. --- > our survey shows that it is not so much the monetary value or rate of growth that matters, as it is the physical composition of the global economic metabolism: How much land are we converting from forest to pasture? How much energy are we using, what are its physical properties, and how is it generated? --- > It is not enough if the market for ‘clean meat’ or renewables grows quickly – their environmentally deleterious competitors must also contract, and this is unlikely to happen if environmental policy is guided by price signals. --- > On 10 April 1947, thirty-nine European and American intellectuals congregated at the Hotel du Parc, a luxurious Swiss establishment perched upon Mont Pèlerin.32 Those attending this first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society – an organization that still exists – sought to reinvent liberalism for an age when the market was everywhere in retreat. The Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war welfare state made clear that classical liberalism’s faith in laissez-faire was obsolete. Departing from their eighteenth-century tradition, the neoliberals recognized that markets were hardly natural but rather needed nurturing and protection by a strong state. Markets deserved such care because they could concentrate knowledge diffused throughout society into the metric of price. The conference’s impresario, Friedrich Hayek, saw the price system as a mechanism not merely for exchanging goods but also ‘for communicating information’.33 Markets allowed people to act rationally as individuals without full knowledge of why prices change, which meant that society’s ‘optimal ignorance’ was surprisingly high.34 --- > why is it ‘Half-Earth’ and not a quarter or three-fifths? Early on in his career, Wilson and his colleague Robert MacArthur discovered a simple mathematical relationship between land area and biodiversity. In their study of island biogeography, they found that the number of species was roughly proportional to the fourth root of the area.38 ... As 15 per cent of the world’s land area is presently protected (plus a measly 2 per cent of the ocean), only half of all species will survive the Sixth Extinction.39 To create a global ark able to protect 84 per cent of species, then 50 per cent of Earth needs to be protected (0.50.25 = 0.84). --- > The concept of Half-Earth comes from E. O. Wilson, an entomologist whose research has shown the need to rewild half of the planet to staunch the haemorrhaging of biodiversity. - _Tags_: `c1` --- > Neoliberal hegemony has endured so long because its opponents have repeatedly let crises go to waste. --- > At the end of the Cold War, China had only just begun to build up what was to become its gigantic livestock industry, thus bringing its millennia-old tradition of sustainable agriculture to an end.49 As a consequence of this agricultural industrialization, avian flu (H5N1) jumped for the first time from poultry to humans in 1997, with numerous outbreaks in China and elsewhere since then. --- > While it is necessary to end the exploitation of animals, animal-rights activists should temper their attacks on Indigenous hunting, both out of respect for a different way of life and as a matter of tactics, because native peoples have spearheaded many successful environmental campaigns.59 Indigenous hunting, after all, is not what got us into this mess. In fact, biodiversity tends to be higher in Indigenous-managed territory than in nature preserves. --- > How such a Half-Earth socialist coalition might come to power we cannot say. In some countries it might follow a path similar to the rise of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in South Africa: a mixture of strikes, divestment, sabotage, elections, boycotts, and violence. In other countries a purely electoral strategy might work, but such a victory would only mark a new phase of struggle. --- > Karl Marx approved of competing in elections but predicted that if a dedicated socialist party were to ever win, the ruling class would unleash a ‘pro-slavery rebellion’ against a ‘peaceful and legal revolution’.62 Nearly a century later, this prediction was borne out by the massacre in Chile in 1973. --- > Condescension towards utopianism is not only poetically impoverished but also a tactical mistake, because it limits the Left’s ability to implement a socialist programme upon taking power. --- > In the rare chance that they take power, socialists will falter and fall without a programme to guide the transition beyond capitalism. Half-Earth socialism, we hope, is a vision of the future that can develop into a total alternative to capitalism, including everything from a plan for resource allocation to an outline of what life will feel like. --- > 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.’ ---