#half earth

[hakaiika]

Project HECoPS #1

I am posting this a lil late, but better late than never! I give to you, Project HECoPS! My neurodivergent attempt at creating a cybernetic planning system for the game "Half-Earth Socialism"

If you wanna read about that, please check out my substack!

Project HECoPS #1

Introduction to Project HECoPS and Cybernetics

[probablyasocialecologist]

Just as scapegoating immigrants for wilderness loss has been used to 'green' white-nationalist and other anti-immigrant sentiments in the USA, the a priori assumption that local communities pose a threat to nature is bound to a colonial mindset that legitimises practises deleterious to both humans and non-humans.

Brian M Napoletano and Brett Clark, An Ecological-Marxist Response to the Half-Earth Project

[solarpunks]

[probablyasocialecologist]

Since the World Parks Congress in Bali in 1973 it has been shown that protected areas work best if they are supported by local people. A recent study that examined 165 protected areas globally found that protected areas ‘that explicitly integrated local people as stakeholders tended to be more effective at achieving joint biological conservation and socioeconomic development outcomes’. Studies of forestry management have reached the same conclusions. Yet advocates of dramatic spatial expansion of protected areas say little about how these areas can be sustained socially and politically.

Half-Earth or Whole Earth? Radical ideas for conservation, and their implications

[probablyasocialecologist]

In this system, ‘quantity rules absolute’, meaning that growing returns on investment constitute the primary concern. Qualitative concerns, such as those associated with natural limits, are not part of this capitalist accounting system. Instead, capital displaces the problems associated with transgressing these limits throughout its metabolism—most obviously in space, as the bypassing of local environmental and labour regulations through intra- and inter-national reconfigurations of production and consumption to reduce monopoly capital’s production costs readily attest, but also through technical changes and shifts in the intensity and volume of the social metabolism. Thus, the singular focus of capital produces a social metabolism that operates in ways that increasingly exceed and deplete the regenerative capacities of ecosystems and the earthly metabolism. This alienation from nature manifests in various metabolic rifts—ruptures in and between ecological processes—harmful to humans and non-humans alike.

Brian M Napoletano and Brett Clark, An Ecological-Marxist Response to the Half-Earth Project

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ideology and Politics of E. O. Wilson's Serious Science

The misunderstanding of science's role in society and inability to see ideology in science are baffling to read in 'New Left Review'.

Wilson’s beautiful prose on nature, biodiversity, and conservation—which may have inspired many toward environmentalism—also warrants scrutiny under an ideological lens. It is necessary to consider how the faux neutrality of biology and ecology has given rise to a reactionary version of environmentalism that fixates on “overpopulation” and sees population control as a plausible and desirable solution, and how much Wilson’s work provided fodder for the growth of these tendencies. This is beyond the scope of this critique. Notwithstanding, Wilson is far from a radical figure for the left in conservation. Instead of achieving a sociohistorical understanding of environmental crises through the work of John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, Andreas Malm, and others, Wilson’s lesson is that humans have been “greedy” and “ignorant.” Such moralistic prose and analytic deficiency become extremely dangerous when one is forced to consider “which half of the Earth is to be set aside?”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Getting by without petroleum or petroleum-based products (fertilisers and pesticides, for example) forced the largest and most compressed experiment in organic and urban gardening in history. The early 1990s saw the creation of 26,000 public gardens in Havana alone, turning the city into a big urban farm that supplied enough produce for about half of its nutritional needs. Although the notion will surely horrify work-shy futurists, the substitution of labour intensity for power intensity is in itself not a bad thing. If half-earthing were ever implemented, agriculture could usefully soak up unemployed workers from defunct industries that were dependent on high fossil-fuel consumption. During the Período Especial, Cuba bought over a million bicycles from China to replace the idle buses and cars. Eating less meat and more vegetables, combined with cycling or walking to work generally led to improved health in the general population. Plantation monocultures could not be managed without massive fossil-fuel inputs, so Cubans cultivated less land more intensively, returning about a third of farmland to wilderness. This has helped Cuba maintain its incredible biodiversity (indeed, it is listed amongst Wilson’s global hotspots) and led the World Wildlife Fund to recognize it as the world’s only ‘sustainable’ country. With its effective and low-cost social policy and post-fossil fuel economy, the experience of Cuba in the 1990s offers the outline of a feasible, eco-egalitarian half-earth society.

Troy Vettese, To Freeze the Thames

[jessequicksters]

spent too much time playing the half-earth socialism game

i finally won <3