Has anybody else read this book? I'm about halfway through and I feel like I've been learning a lot from this. While the book is endlessly critical of the former Soviet experiment and the modern PRC without cushioning it's critiques by acknowledging that much of their problematic climate elements are due to material conditions, I find many of their critiques and ideas refreshing.
I'm a little ambivalent on their information about Nuclear Power too, I personally had assumed that Nuclear tech was brought to an incredibly safe level.
But beyond that I think some of the central thesis of the book of treating nature as a "known unknown", and needing to harness the power of hopeful utopianism while making use of the best elements of scientific socialism, I think these are swell things to adopt. The book is, on the whole, a bit lib in the ways that utopian socialists are, but I do think at the end of the day it prescribes some necessary ideas that are seriously worth engaging with.
Has anyone else read this book and have any thoughts, or ways we can adapt this critique to the struggle of socialism?
I genuinely do not know how well the critique lands, because I've never read this book, but Max Ajl's A People's Green New Deal speaks decisively about the faults of half-earth theories. I often build up doubts about his critiques (thinking of Nuclear energy, where I happen to have a lot of technical/safety knowledge), but often realize I'm missing his broader critique (here, centralized energy sources in a world that should be better spread among and working with nature). I have felt critical like this about his half-earth critique, feeling that it seems strawmanning, but the broader, more integrated, critique still actually hits astonishingly well. The perspective of nature cannot get over the commodification of that nature and the western cahauvinistic separation from that commodity. His opinion is that this leads to entirely ineffective, imperialistic, and possibly culturally destructive western perspectives that will never leave even if the utopia is close