This article is a perhaps quixotic attempt at answering the eternal question: “What should I do with my life?”
It seems difficult to overstate the scale of the issues (outlined here) facing both humanity and the biosphere as a whole: from climate change to biodiversity loss, and from increasing economic inequalities to the rise of authoritarian governments, global trends are hardly cause for optimism.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein. Knopf Canada, 2007
In This Changes Everything, her latest book, Naomi Klein mentions how she used to be more concerned about the political and economic aspects of global issues—in particular, the issues brought about or exacerbated by the role powerful corporations—than by more “environmental” aspects (although the deeply problematic human-nature relation is of course indissociable from political and economic considerations). Obviously, her view then shifted, and she now considers climate change the greatest challenge of our time.
After reading This Changes Everything, which I found particularly convincing (see review here), I felt hungry for more; Klein’s prose tends to be full of verve and rather passionate, to say the least, and yet the points she makes are both convincing and well-researched. So I decided to pick up The Shock Doctrine, which was published ten years ago.