Edward Jenner took the long view. His 1798 treatise on vaccination, which reported a revolutionary new method of preventing smallpox, opened with a medical philosophy of history rather than a description of symptoms or a review of existing treatments. “The deviation of Man from the state in which he was originally placed by Nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of Diseases,” he explained.Footnote ¹ By this he meant that infectious disease ultimately resulted from human and animal intermingling since the agricultural revolution, an insight anthropologists and epidemiologists have since confirmed. The majority of human pathogens are ultimately zoonoses, originating not at the dawn of the human species but in the relatively recent past. Measles likely evolved from the bovine disease rinderpest seven thousand years ago.Footnote ² Influenza may have started about forty-five hundred years ago with the domestication of waterfowl.Footnote ³ Jenner's own specialty, smallpox, probably originated four thousand years ago in eastern Africa when a gerbil virus jumped to the newly domesticated camel and then to humans.Footnote ⁴ The New World's Indigenous nations cultivated countless crops but practiced little animal husbandry, allowing them to live relatively free of disease before 1492.Footnote ⁵ European conquest succeeded in a large part thanks to the invaders’ pathogenic armory of measles, typhus, tuberculosis, and smallpox, which decimated Indigenous populations by 90 percent over the succeeding centuries.

Jenner's insight that zoonoses are historical artifacts rather than timeless maladies helps us see that the ultimate cause of disease is too much work. That is, if we define work as seventeenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers did: the mixture of human effort with nature, an action that instilled the latter with human consciousness. As John Locke explained, “[Man] takes something from the state that nature has provided and left it in, he mixes his labour with it, thus joining to it something that is his own; and in that way he makes it his property.” When the Lockean colonists of New England looked on the natives they sought to replace, they did not see a sophisticated constellation of complex and remarkably healthy societies—they saw people who did not work the land, and therefore had no right to it.Footnote ⁶ Locke thought that property came only from a very particular kind of work, but he did not realize that disease too shared the same origins.

Unlike many public intellectuals today, who reduce the history of epidemics to a series of bolts from the blue, epidemiologists divide history into three zoonotic epochs: one that began with the Neolithic revolution in agriculture ten thousand years ago, followed by a century of improvements in public health between the 1850s and 1970s, and a third disastrous era of explosive disease emergence over the last half-century. This latest epoch has witnessed the spread of novel pathogens such as HIV, Ebola, and SARS-CoV-2. It took the development of modern medicine to counter millennia of zoonotic emergence: Only in the past 150 years did human beings live lives as healthy as their paleolithic ancestors, and a new wave of pandemics threatens to undo that small advance.Footnote ⁷ Our present disease burden would not have surprised Jenner, as he recognized that the prevalence of disease was commensurate with humanity's entanglement with nature. “[Man] has familiarised himself with a great number of animals,” he warned, “which may not originally have been intended for his associates.”Footnote ⁸

If the second zoonotic era was largely co-terminous with modernity, it is not surprising that the same forces that have ushered in post-modernity—the ascendancy of neo-liberalism, the rise of oligopolistic multinational firms, and the rapid but uneven development in the Global South—should have led to a new era of disease as well. Cash-crops, logging, and mining projects have penetrated deep into the heart of previously intact ecosystems, creating unprecedented opportunities for pathogens to jump species. The debt crises of the 1980s wiped out the public health infrastructure in the Global South, making epidemics more likely to occur and harder to contain. The Coasean firm that ruthlessly outsources rather than builds up in-house expertise has been a disaster for meat production, as contractors rarely have the public health training or PPE to safely run a factory farm. The emergence of the factory farm itself is closely linked to the efforts of Mont Pelerin Society members Antony Fisher and FA Harper.Footnote ⁹ While it had seemed for a time that medical advances could keep pace with new diseases during the modern era, the post-modern condition is one of ever greater afflictions.

From a Jennerite perspective, we see that the third zoonotic era is merely a subset of a far broader environmental crisis, a disaster that has radically deepened over the last two generations. Climate change is the facet we discuss most, but it represents a failure of the imagination when we artificially divvy up the environmental crisis into discrete problems, such as urban sprawl, mass extinction, eutrophication, noncommunicable diseases, and epidemics. The science behind each of these phenomena is complicated, but the overall process is simple: the less room humanity leaves to nature, the more environmental problems—including new, deadly zoonoses—there will be. The face of the Earth has been transformed by human labor, which has widened the pathogenic portal between humans and animals. As an early expert of the Ebola virus put it in 1976: “The larger the scale of man-made environmental changes, the greater must be the probability of emergence of a zoonosis, old or new.”Footnote ¹⁰ The only way to address the environmental crisis is to reduce the scale of human intervention in nature, which is another way to say that we need to imagine a world of less work.

The link between work and the transformation of nature was set out by Locke, but it was GWF Hegel and Karl Marx who described the process as the “humanisation of nature,” which we find more useful than the static “Anthropocene” to understand the present crisis. Hegel first theorized on the humanization of nature in “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (1798), an essay published the same year as Jenner's treatise. The patriarch Abraham is a pivotal figure for Hegel, for his decision to leave Ur represents the last attempt to renounce civilization and live independently in nature. In the wilds of Canaan, Abraham may have been independent, but he was not free, for nature was an alien all-powerful force that opposed him—“he was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike.”Footnote ¹¹ Hegel develops this historical narrative further in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which begins with the tension between the subjective human and the objective, alien world of nature. Labor is Hegel's solution to the subject-object problem, for it allows humans to see themselves reflected in nature, reconciling the two. Geist replaces the alien will of nature. Marx borrowed much of this story whole cloth, especially in the 1844 Manuscripts: “[Man] contemplates himself in a world he has created.” Both Marx and Hegel believed the end of history would be marked by humanity's total control over nature, an aim that still maintains its hold over sections of the Left today.

Hegel and Marx are correct to begin with humanity's ignorance of nature, but they miss its natural corollary: action undertaken without full knowledge certainly leads to unforeseen consequences. Put another way, Marx and Hegel's philosophy of history began with the invention of agriculture, but they overlooked its twin—the zoonotic epidemic. It has long been manifest that as our labor infuses the Earth with human consciousness, nature's alien will is diminished but never absent. As the face of the Earth transforms from forest and plain into pasture and crop fields, and as the energy of the sun and wind are replaced with fossilized chemical energy, temperatures rise, ecosystems collapse, and new microbes spread. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which was a century after a youthful Marx scribbled in his notebooks, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno recognized that “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”

Both Marx and Hegel recognized that in modernity, the alien will of capital rather than human consciousness drives the transformation of nature. While Abraham chose what food to grow and which animals to herd, today those choices are made by inhuman market forces. Instead of seeing themselves and their desires reflected in their work, as in earlier eras of history, workers under capitalism are confronted by a world made by their hand, yet nonetheless one that is “hostile and alien.” The capitalist is not free either, because unlike preceding elites, he is under pressure to renounce worldly pleasures. While Hegel thought that the reign of capital would end with the onset of the French Revolution, Marx witnessed capitalism become a world-changing force hardy enough to survive repeated economic and political disasters—including the first global cholera epidemic, which killed Hegel in 1831. Epidemics have made a mockery of the epistemic foundations of Hegel and Marx's philosophy of history, yet both still believed that the end of history would witness society's overthrow of capital and the complete humanization of nature.

Prometheanism is integral to the Left because of its Marxist and Hegelian heritage, making it much harder to expunge than many socialists would like to admit. Indeed, it still manifests itself today in some strains of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” and the growing popularity of nuclear power and geo-engineering.Footnote ¹² A socialism viable in an age of environmental catastrophe needs to be cut to its philosophical foundations and rebuilt with ecological concerns at its core. It requires a new epistemology that emphasizes our ability to control the economy but underscores our ignorance of nature. If we have to choose between managing nature and managing the economy, the latter is infinitely easier for at least the economy is a human creation. To return the world to a stable enough configuration, to undo climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and the explosion of new zoonoses, we will require a massive effort of “un-building,” to rewild continental swaths of land and consciously plan the rest without recourse to the unconscious processes of the market. We call this program “Half-Earth Socialism.”

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Half-Earth Socialism begins with a question asked by surprisingly few people: what would a complete solution to the environmental crisis actually look like? It cannot be capitalist, as capital's unconscious control of nature will lead to ruin. Mere reform will not suffice. We must remember the radical cost of solutions proposed by environmental scientists and organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the latter advocates for a complete remaking of the global economic order in the space of a couple of decades, yet they seem oblivious to socialist economics.Footnote ¹³ The sweeping changes the IPCC demands could only occur if humans consciously control their interaction with nature. Moreover, such a political economy requires the recognition that we depend on hyper-complex ecological systems that will always remain beyond our ken. The humanization of nature must be reined in with epistemic humility.

We need a socialism that can address the environmental crisis’ many facets. For example, how can we stop the Sixth Extinction? E. O. Wilson was one of the first ecologists to estimate that we need to rewild roughly half of the Earth, an aim he called the “Half-Earth.” That conclusion drew on his research half a century before, The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967), which showed that biodiversity declines according to the fourth root of habitable land. As only 15 percent of the world is protected as nature preserves, this implies that by the end of the century, 50 percent of all species will go extinct. Alternatively, protecting half of the world will help 85 percent of species survive. Unless we consciously leave land beyond the reach of labor, the humanization of nature will be as devastating to life as a meteoric impact or a mega-volcano eruption. Like the IPCC, Wilson fails to marry his scientific insight to a radical economic program able to bring it about. Half-Earth Socialism not only places the Sixth Extinction within the frame of political economy but also other ecological problems, such as climate change and zoonoses.

Public health officials are well aware that the ultimate solution to zoonotic disease is to create a buffer between us and nature. The American Public Health Association has called for a moratorium on factory farming, the site of many new zoonoses. In the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak, the association's journal published an editorial advocating for a change to “the way humans treat animals—most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten” as a basic measure of public health. “Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic.”Footnote ¹⁴ Epidemiologists recognize that enlarging conservation areas is an important way to prevent pathogens from making the leap from wild animals to humans.

Both Wilson and epidemiologists have noticed that reversing the humanization of nature will take a lot of land, but we must consider yet another land-hungry goal: a fully renewable energy system. Back during the “biological old regime” in Jenner's day, land scarcity was a widespread topic of discussion for political economists. It only disappeared from economics in the mid-twentieth century as the durability of the fossil-fuel energy system became apparent. Gargantuan stores of coal and petroleum liberated humanity from painful decisions about land use: Rather than having to worry about whether to cultivate marginal land, or having to decide to grow fuel instead of food, humanity could instead access the energy stored by ancient plants over eons in the form of energy-dense hydrocarbons. Renewable sources of energy like solar, wind, and biofuels do not benefit from geological forces of concentration, but must be spread across vast expanses. Vaclav Smil, an energy scholar, points out that renewables have a much lower “power density” than fossil fuels, a term he coined to describe the relationship between energy produced relative to a system's surface area measured in Watts per square meter (W/m²).Footnote ¹⁵ The switch from wood and hydropower to fossil fuels made it possible to free up land for other purposes, like suburban sprawl or rangeland for rapidly increasing meat production.

By moving away from fossil fuels, we also will be giving up the savings in land use they represent, making other ecological objectives that much harder to meet. While the richest deposits of fossil fuels can have power densities near 20,000 W/m², even the dregs rarely fall below 1,000 W/m².Footnote ¹⁶ This is why only 0.5 percent of US territory is dedicated to its highly fossil-fuel dependent energy system.Footnote ¹⁷ In contrast, the highest power density for solar- and wind-powered infrastructure is about 10–20 W/m², but often far less in sub-par regions.Footnote ¹⁸ Smil estimates that total 25–50 percent of the US land mass would be dedicated to a fully renewable energy system, while rich and densely populated countries in western Europe would reach a ratio of 100 percent.

Half-Earth Socialism will need huge swathes of land, forcing it to dispossess the greatest land-owner in the world—the livestock industry. If all the land dedicated to pasture and feed-crops were made contiguous, it would encompass all of the Americas, some 27 percent of the world's land-mass. By contrast, the land requirements of urban areas (1 percent) and crops for human consumption (7 percent) are puny.Footnote ¹⁹ Much of the area used for livestock was forested until recently, and we will need to forest it again to halt the Sixth Extinction, to establish a cordon sanitaire between humans and wild animals, and to sequester the carbon that has already built up in the atmosphere. To make reforestation a successful part of our climate strategy we'll need land on the scale of two and a half Canadas (2.6 billion hectares), estimates Ulrich Kreidenweis, a climate scientist based in Potsdam.Footnote ²⁰ From the dead land of pasture and mono-cropped soy and maize, we will receive a bounty of protected, biodiverse forests able to sequester 860 gigatonnes of CO2 by 2100. This works out to roughly 10 gigatonnes a year, an incredible amount that cannot be achieved by artificial sequestration technologies anytime soon. If we don't employ negative emissions technologies (and reforestation is the best we have) then greenhouse gas reductions might have to be 15 percent a year until 2040—twice the pace for twice as long. Such a decrease would be equivalent to nearly five SARS-CoV-2 pandemics a year for a generation.

With these constraints on land-use in mind, we can begin to chart a course forward into a post-pandemic future. For example, Smil's calculations on power density imply that energy use must be cut if we are to have enough land to meet all of our goals. Drawing on the work of the 2,000 Watt Society, a brainchild of Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology, we advocate for a universal energy quota. Such a quota would be cleanly redistributive: Convergence at 2,000 W requires consumption to contract in the rich world, but allows it to expand in poor countries.Footnote ²¹ An average US citizen uses 12,000 W (i.e., 288 kWh/day), which is twice as much as a typical Western European, and a dozen-fold greater than an Indian (who would be encouraged to double their energy-use by building services, expanding transit, and so on). A global 2,000 Watt Society would free up demands for land. If Britons used on average only 2,000 W, then less than a third of the country's land would be needed for renewable energy, making a transition more feasible. Another source of land could come from the dramatic constriction of the meat industry. From these starting points, we can begin to map the changes required to ensure the flourishing of both the biosphere and of human civilization. To begin, we redefine the kind of work and un-building necessary to truly transcend the environmental crisis by tempering what Jenner diagnosed as “the love of splendour, […] the indulgences of luxury” that leads us to dominate nature.

Since the demands of a just society and the demands of nature are both so great, the work of Half-Earth Socialists must be planned. A major influence on our conception of Half-Earth Socialism is Otto Neurath, one of the more idiosyncratic and polymathic socialists of the twentieth century. His socialism goes to the heart of capital's unconscious control over humans and natural history because he clearly articulates what a consciously controlled socialist economy looks like. He devised what he called “in natura calculation” to replace money, because he believed that any reliance on a “universal equivalent” like money or “utility” (as market socialists would come to prefer) was “pseudo-rational.” By reducing a good or service to a single number, be it price, abstract labor time, or something else, we destroy an enormous amount of vital information. To Neurath, a truly rational paradigm recognized that any decision would always involve irreducible social, ethical, economic, and environmental considerations. He came to prize in natura calculation during his time as a war planner during World War I and afterwards in the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Socialist democracy was the ability to choose amongst several national plans, all with their own pros and cons, none reduced to a single number like profit. Neurath's approach wrests back human control over its history. Neurathian economics is also amenable to ecological goals, for we can set aims such as rewilding the Half-Earth, near universal veganism, equal energy quotas for the Global North and South, and fully renewable energy systems. Though he was far from a perfect environmentalist, he still worried about the ruin of the mountains and about the market's inability to allocate scarce resources rationally.Footnote ²² The problem for Neurath was that he lacked a way to actually devise his plans in an efficient manner.

It wasn't until the mathematical breakthroughs of Leonid Kantorovich in the 1940s and 1950s that a potential implementation of Neurathian economics became feasible. Kantorovich, the USSR's sole recipient of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics (1975), developed a fast method of mathematical optimization known as “linear programming” and applied it to problems in economic planning. The idea was simple: By posing a problem as a set of linear equations of clearly-defined variables, a computer could quickly derive an optimum plan.

Paul Cockshott, a computer scientist at the University of Glasgow, developed a detailed example of how Kantorovich's methods could be used to build an economic plan for a socialist society.Footnote ²³ He imagines a simplified economy with three outputs—energy, food, and machines—the production of which requires labor, wind, and river power, all taking place on either fertile valley land or poorer highlands. In this toy model, a planner could produce electricity by building dams to tap hydro-power, but at the cost of flooding the fertile valleys, or by building turbines on hilly land without compromising its use for agriculture. He poses these constraints quantitatively, in a format easily understood by a computer. For agriculture, suppose a valley could produce 50,000 units of food using 10,000 workers, 1,000 machines, and 20,000 units of energy, while the less fertile highlands produce 20,000 units of food using 10,000 workers, 800 machines, and 10,000 units of energy. For electricity production, imagine a dam produces 60,000 units of energy, but uses up all the land in one valley, as well as 100 workers and 80 machines, while a windmill produces 500 units of electricity using 4 workers and 6 machines (but the highland can still be used for farming). If machine production uses 20 units of electricity and 10 workers per device manufactured, the total workforce is 104,000 people, and the planning office has determined that three times more food than energy should be produced, then a linear optimization algorithm can be run to determine optimal resource allocations. We find that such a society shouldn't build any dams, as our workforce is best spent on farming the fertile valleys and building machines, all powered by 541 wind turbines. If the workforce were halved, then the algorithm indicates that we would be better off flooding one valley for power generation, as our smaller workforce is less able to both produce agricultural machinery and farm the more fertile lowlands. Importantly, the planner is able to rationally choose between various kinds of production and land management without depending on a single universal equivalent, whether that is money or labor time.

Kantorovich's core idea—never implemented in a socialist society, though it has proven extremely popular with private firms—paired with further developments in mathematical optimization, make the planning of a Half-Earth Socialist society possible. Constraints on land use, energy production, and agriculture can all be provided, and made subject to democratic debate. Further geophysical information on climate, species diversity, and productivity can also be fed into an optimization algorithm, to achieve a variety of goals. In the end, a plan is produced that meets all the constraints of nature and the requirements of an eco-austere society. It is important to note that Half-Earth Socialism would at first depend only on proven, existing technologies because we have so little time. Enormous geophysical models of the planet are already used to make predictions about climate change and agricultural productivity; we merely would be using those tools to plan our civilization, rather than leaving such an important task to the unconsciousness of capital.

What, then, will truly post-pandemic labor look like? Un-building, it turns out, is a lot of work. A return to organic, fossil-free farming would require both a huge amount of muscle-power. We will need to mobilize a vast sum of brain power to plan the world economy and our interaction with a healthy biosphere. A growing sector of care workers will be needed for the low-carbon activities that make the good life possible, like education, social services, and public health. As the humanization of nature is reversed, the philosophers of labor like Locke, Hegel, and Marx would see Half-Earth Socialism as a step backwards. As we know the limits of the historical process to transform the Earth, we can now be confident of arriving at the end of history.