Optimism of the Will

Over a hundred architecture students packed into a Columbia auditorium to listen to Drew Pendergrass, a PhD student in environmental engineering at Harvard, and Troy Vettese, an environmental historian at the European University Institute, elaborate their proposal for a “half-earth socialism.” The duo’s talking points—mostly drawn from their book of the same name, published by Verso in 2022—recast the environmental crisis in the terms of political economy. Along the way, they invoked studies into the material constraints of a market economy, urban experiments in China, even board games by Marxist philosophers. Denouncing capitalism for its inability “to achieve a real democracy,” they called for worldwide socialist planning, a rewilding of half the earth, and a rapid transition to renewable energy. Pendergrass and Vettese didn’t shy away from crucial questions having to do with nonmarket economies and the global dimension of exploitation; instead, they elevated these problems to the scale of human governance. For this cohort of architecture students, who will be aske…