Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor in Chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guests today are Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vitezi.

They are the authors of the new book Half Earth Socialism,

a plan to save the future from extinction, climate change, and pandemics available from Verso.

The book is described as a provocative, brilliant, beguiling little book that works in the best

Marxist utopian tradition, bringing the scientific minds clear-eyed analysis together

with what the heart's world of imagination and what might be. That's from the publisher.

I would concur with that assessment. Half-Earth socialism is a wonderful, weird, unique, brilliant little book.

So Drew is currently a PhD student in environmental engineering at Harvard.

He's published, in fact, in current affairs before.

Troy is an environmental historian and a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute.

And so Troy and Drew, it is very nice to have you with me here on Current Affairs.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thank you.

So I haven't read a book quite like this before.

I don't think there's been a book quite like this before, at least not for a hundred years or so. And even then, I don't think there was, there's ever been something quite like this. So one of the challenges we're going to have here is we want to be able to describe this thing that you have produced. And so the book is called half earth Socialism. We'll get into what the concept of Half Earth Socialism

that you put forward in this book is.

But I guess I was trying to think,

how do I start with y'all?

And my opening inquiry here is going to be

what is the question to which this book is the answer? That's a good way to approach it,

because I think, you know, we were writing this book to understand certain problems. That's,

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