Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a William Lyon Mackenzie King postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the coauthor of Half-Earth Socialism, to be published by Verso in the spring of 2021.
Commentators like to point to Wuhan’s “wet markets” as the source of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is the result of a much larger, global phenomenon of environmental degradation. Combatting both means putting the politics of food production and land use at the very heart of our socialist project.
The ruling class will never give up fossil fuel, because it’s key to their power over workers.
Canada’s tar sands are destructive and massively inefficient. But for capitalists, they’re the future.