GSI Seminar Series - Troy Vettese: Can we do without planetary management?

Are there ways of addressing the environmental crisis that do not reduce nature to a series of levers to be pulled? The term 'planet management' dates back to at least 1984, as the title of a collection put together by the neo-Malthusian biologist and impresario, Norman Myers. More critically, the term was adopted fifteen years later by Fernando Elichirigoity in his study on the contributors to the Limits to Growth. Yet, the schemes of yesteryear's neo-Malthusians appear quaint compared to today's would-be planet managers hailing from across the political spectrum, from neoliberal accelerationists to eco-Leninists. Indeed, there is a disquieting overlap between the right and left on the environmental crisis. The ends -- geoengineering, a massive roll-out of nuclear power or CCS, etc. -- are largely the same, the difference lies in whether the market or the state could better provide the means to realize such goals. Despite thirty years of ecosocialist scholarship, it seems the best Marxists can strive for is a 'good mastery' of nature, as Reiner Grundmann approvingly called it in the early 1990s. Is this really undoing the Prometheanism congenital to Marxism? Merely repairing various 'metabolic rifts' too seems to be a form of planet management too, for it is still predicated on overestimating the agency of humanity while obscuring our reliance on the billions of creatures we share our world with. By contrast, could large-scale rewilding be a form of planet liberation, rather than planet management? Solutions at a planetary level are certainly needed -- the crypto-reactionary lilliputian politics of the Ostromian commons must be rejected -- but can such an approach be based on freeing nature from our control, rather than deepening our domination of it? From these starting points, the talk will then survey the incongruous terrain of Daoist philosophy, socialist planning in Hungary in the 1970s, and the end of history. 

Troy Vettese is a project scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. He and Drew Pendergrass co-authored Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2022), which has been translated into Swedish, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Thai. The two are currently writing a sequel on ecosocialist democracy and Marxist animal ethics. Vettese's popular writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New Statesman, n+1, Jacobin, the New Republic, and In These Times. 

If you would like to attend in-person please let us know: infoGSI@exeter.ac.uk. If you are not on our mailing list and would like the Zoom link please contact infoGSI@exeter.ac.uk