“In short, dropping out and planting vegetables is not an option for this generation.” – p405
This Changes Everything. Capitalism vs. the Climate, by Naomi Klein. Simon & Schuster, 2014
This Changes Everything investigates the climate change crisis—what has caused it, what it means and how it should be addressed—from a decidedly political standpoint. As the author states, she is less interested in “the mechanics of the transition” (i.e. the nitty-gritty technological shift) we need to accomplish than in “the power and ideological roadblocks” that stand in the way. It is a stimulating and invigorating approach.
I found her book an extremely powerful, in-depth and well-researched essay, written with passion and a sense of burning outrage that make it all the more compelling. According to Klein, climate change is much more than an “issue” that we can “solve” by simply shifting to renewable energy sources (although this is certainly necessary); indeed, not only does she demonstrate, quite brilliantly, how the climate crisis is intimately linked with our entire economic system as it has developed since the first industrial revolutions, and how the last three decades of unfettered neoliberalism and globalization have amplified it and made it extremely hard to combat—but also, more deeply, how it is the direct product of an “extractivist” mindset that has plagued our civilization since at least the invention of the steam engine.
In a word, climate change isn’t just a technical issue of greenhouse gas emissions, but more fundamentally, a glaring manifestation of our attitude of domination and exploitation toward the planet and other human beings. Therefore, the “climate moment” should be seized as a wake-up call, an occasion to put to rights a host of social issues and to build a mass movement rallying around a completely new worldview. Changing our energy sources should go together with transforming our society, and our mindset.
This book is certainly among the most cogent and persuasive ones I have ever read on these issues, so this review will be rather long and detailed.
***
Klein presents a global overview of the situation we’re in, and her opinion on it, quite forcefully and convincingly in her introduction:
- We have been conscious that climate change is taking place for a quarter of a century, and yet have done very little to curb it in any meaningful way;
- Chief among the reasons for this is the overwhelming rise of neoliberalism and the spread of globalization over this exact same period of time—thus, “very bad timing” for mankind to tackle an issue, since that threatens the hegemony of the powers that be, and their ideology (market deregulation, privatization, cuts to public spending);
- Therefore, our capitalistic economic system is at war with the climate, and thus with life on earth. And the former is winning. The only way out is to heed the “civilizational wake-up call” that is the climate crisis, and not only transform our economic and political system, but first and foremost transform our dominant ideologies regarding human society and our relation to the rest of the planet. And there is no time left to do this gradually;
- In a word, the climate crisis could be the occasion for a “People’s Shock” that would finally take us beyond a toxic and outdated way of life, for more economic equality around the world and a revolution of consciousness.
“A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing the planet. Telling us we need to evolve.”
***
In the first part of her book, Klein explores how climate change is largely a crisis due to “bad timing.”
First of all, because the scientific confirmation and the acute consciousness of this crisis itself occurred at a time of triumph for the neoliberal ideology. Since it started to be heavily promoted by Reagan and Thatcher in the early 1980s, this market fundamentalism—which advocate “deregulating” markets, privatization, corporate tax breaks and thus limited state spending—has taken the entire world by storm, imposing its agenda in all major international institutions. Climate change, however, requires active state intervention, to reign in corporate destructiveness, promote cleaner energy sources and ways of life, and correct ever-deepening economic inequality.
Little wonder, therefore, that hardcore conservatives see the theory of human-induced climate change as a terrible threat: “As soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.” If we say on the same course, climate change will impose corrections to our ways of life anyway, but in a potentially much more terrifying way: “We will get the big corporate, big military, big engineering responses to climate change—the world of a tiny group of big corporate winners and armies of locked-out losers.” The success of the neoliberal revolution, and its results, should precisely sting us into action: we must center our lives and economy around other values that are being vindicated by the laws of nature.
Chief among the successes of neoliberalism was the spread of globalization, which really took flight in the 1990s with the birth of the WTO. The climate movement started off at the same time. And yet globalized trade was obviously going to be a major source of emissions (delocalized mass production, mass consumption, transportation, etc.): worldwide carbon emissions grew from 1% per year in the 1980s to 3.4% on average between 2000 to 2008. Nonetheless, the parallel processes of climate and trade conferences basically functioned “as two solitudes”, ignoring each other. But while the commitments made by governments in the climate negociations were based on the honor system, those in the trade agreements were enforced through dispute settlement with real teeth… We know who gained the upper hand when these two solitudes met.
Limiting global warming to +2 degrees above 1990 levels requires developed economies to cut their emissions by at least −8 to −10% per year; so far, even in Europe, only Slovenia has come close to that feat from 2013 to 2014. Doing this on a large enough scale calls for radical and immediate degrowth strategies: less consumption, less global trade—more state spending, and private/public investment in alternative infrastructure and technology.
In a word, we need a “carefully planned economy with much more humane and fulfilling lifestyles”; and this goes completely against the reigning economic orthodoxy, at every level. This notably requires:
- “Re-municipalizing” and decentralizing energy production (like in Germany or Denmark);
- Switching to diverse, resilient and complementary mixes of renewable energy, well-adapted to each region/country;
- Doing away with austerity policies (which increase vulnerability to climate disasters).
This massive, wartime state spending should be funded by making the polluters pay. Just like the tobacco industry has been forced to pay massive amounts for health expenses, the fossil fuel industry should be forced to pay for the damage it inflict, especially through a global progressive carbon tax. But the hyper-rich and the simply well-off, who pollute so much more, should also bear part of the burden (the 500 million richest people in the world emit one half of all GHG emissions). A globally coordinated response is needed—but it should be fair for it to work and gain popular agreement.
Indeed, “real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.” (To me, this is a key take-home message in this book: climate change is an opportunity for overarching positive change, instead of simply an “issue” to solve or mitigate.)
Crucially, fossil fuels have to be kept in the ground. Available, confirmed reserves represent three times (or at least, many times?) what we can afford to burn, if we want to stay below 2 degrees of warming. Of course, fossil fuel companies cannot afford to leave these “stranded assets” where they are, especially when they invest trillions to develop them in increasingly remote locations. So the environmental movement has to be ready to fight this behemoth industry head-on, with dogged focus and strategy: there is no time left for amorphous protest and feel-good declarations. It should do so by building a mass movement, so as to fully see climate change for what it is: a moment to finally correct the ills of unfettered capitalism, for more global justice.
“If there has ever been a moment to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it.”
But obviously, while neoliberalism and globalization exacerbated the climate crisis, they didn’t create it. “The roots of the climate crisis date back to core civilizational myths on which post-Enlightenment Western culture is founded—myths about humanity’s duty to dominate a natural world that is believed to be at once limitless and entirely controllable.” What lies at the bottom of all this is a pervasive “extractivist” mindset, a dominance-based relationship with the earth and other human beings, based around the sole notion of taking. Rich ecosystems are viewed as “resources”, and people as “labor” or even “social burden.” As for all the waste created by our skyrocketing consumption, it ends up in “sacrifice zones” that are invisible to us—indeed, that we don’t want to see.
“At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing—a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us.”
All in all, “we are trapped in linear narratives that tell us…. that we can expand infinitely, that there will always be more space to absorb our waste, more resources to fuel our wants, more people to abuse.” And this way of thinking has fueled industrialization as well as colonialism, which are both based on the domination of nature and people.
“The braided historical threads of colonialism, coal, and capitalism shed significant light on why so many of us who are willing to challenge the injustices of the market system remain paralyzed in the face of the climate threat. Fossil fuels, and the deeper extractivist mindset that they represent, built the modern world. If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story written in coal.”
The only solution is to evolve toward a non-extractivist, post-growth economy, that nonetheless compensates poorer regions of the world for the exploitation they have been subjected to historically. The environmental movement has long struggled to fully accept this uncomfortable necessity.
***
The next main section of the book addresses the issue of how a certain kind of “magical thinking” has been repeatedly hampering efforts to respond to climate change in any adequate way.
Klein starts by shedding light on the heavy responsibility that big North American environmental groups should bear in these matters. While in the 1960s and 70s, North American environmentalism grew as a strong, radical and influential movement, directly responsible for the adoption of dozens of laws to protect land, air, water an wildlife, things changed greatly in the 1980s. The arrival of the Reagan administration, along with the rise to power of right-wing think tanks, put the more institutionalized Green organizations in an awkward position: suddenly, they were cast as dangerous leftists, even though they had grown comfortable dealing and wheeling on Capitol Hill, and earning most of their funding from wealthy politicians and other influential characters. In order not to lose their “insider” status and connections, many of these organizations (such as the Environmental Defense Fund or the Nature Conservancy, for instance) chose not to confront the extreme free-market ideology promoted by the new administration, and instead chose to partner up with big corporations in the hope of influencing them in a way corresponding to their goals. Everything had to be “win-win”—they believed there was a way to make business in a cleaner way. This proved to be a huge disaster:
“This alignment of economic interests—combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as “serious” in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line—fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter—root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were available for sale at Walmart.”
This form of “magical thinking,” most notoriously, even led these big organizations to promote shale gas, extracted through fracking, as a “bridge fuel” that would help the economy make the transition to cleaner energy sources. But not only did this so-called bridge fuel actually weaken the expansion of renewable energy sources in North America, it also proved to be much more GHG-emitting than previously thought: studies have shown that methane leaks during the fracking process make shale gas, as a whole, at least as polluting as oil, and perhaps even as coal.
In their attempt never to antagonize their business buddies, “Big Green” also advocated market solutions to climate change, especially carbon trading systems (“cap-and-trade”)—instead of a carbon tax, for instance. With their blessing, the US pushed for the adoption of these systems in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, against the wishes of the Europeans; the US then withdrew from the protocol, and the EU ironically became the biggest carbon market on the planet. But this carbon market failed miserably, due to European governments not wanting to antagonize polluters, but also because of flaws inherent to the Clean Development Mechanism all around the world—a system which pays people not to pollute, and which was perverted and taken advantage of repeatedly.
Finally, the weak responses to climate change pushed for by Big Green (asking people to walk to work once in a while, to purchase green products, etc.) might have actually confirmed people in the idea that what was happening was probably not that big of a deal. In a word, no actual movement was launched to fight climate change, in the form of mass marches, direct action and angry leaders (contrary to what happened with civil rights, antiwar or feminist campaigns for instance)—until recently.
Klein also elaborates on the illusion that some philanthropic billionaire or other will save us all. Quite a few media-savvy personalities have indeed made spectacular declarations over the past decade, vowing to invest billions into climate-saving technology. The book notably focuses on Richard Branson, who pledged in 2006 to divert $3 billion from the profits of Virgin Airlines to invest in clean technology, and in 2007 launched the Virgin Earth Challenge science and technology prize. But as the years went by, neither Branson nor any other similar philanthrophic entrepreneurs have actually followed through on their promises. Apart from putting more planes in the sky and fracking more gas out of the ground—and supporting the development of carbon capture & storage technology (as Branson has), which is a risky technology whose efficiency remains uncertain, and which anyways doesn’t solve the root causes of global warming (economic growth, mass consumption, etc.).
“The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside and take a hard look at the results…. Most of all, at the parade of billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender. We’ve tried it Branson’s way. (And Buffett’s, Bloomberg’s, Gates’s, and Pickens’s way.) The soaring emissions speak for themselves. There will, no doubt, be more billionaire saviors who make splashy entrances, with more schemes to rebrand capitalism. The trouble is, we simply don’t have another decade to lose pinning our hopes on these sideshows. There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.”
“Post–market crash and amidst ever more sinister levels of inequality, most of us have come to realize that the oligarchs who were minted by the era of deregulation and mass privatization are not, in fact, going to use their vast wealth to save the world on our behalf. Yet our faith in techno wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster.” [1. Still, is there not a case to be made for “market activism”? Is Elon Musk, for instance, just another illusory billionaire savior? More on this in a later post…]
The last form of delusion examined in this part of the book is that surrounding geoengineering—that is, the use of planetary-scale technologies that are expected to alter the climate in a certain way. Among all sorts of crazy ideas (giant space mirrors etc.), the one that has gained the most purchase over the years is that of Solar Radiation Management (SRM): it would involve spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere through planes or helium balloons. These particles would create a permanent haze around the entire planet, blocking out part of the solar energy, and thus cooling down the planet. This technique is also known as the “Pinatubo Option,” after the name of a volcano, because it would essentially replicate the effect of a gigantic volcanic eruption.
Apart from the most obvious depressing effects of such a radical technological recourse (no more blue skies, ever, nor stars at night), there are plenty more to be taken into account:
- As lots of GHG would still be emitted on earth, the oceans would continue their acidification;
- The spraying could never be stopped, for fear of an immediate and cataclysmic rise of temperatures;
- Large parts of the world would likely suffer severe draught and famines, most likely Africa or Asia (as already happened in former major eruptions such as that of Mt. Laki in 1783 or Mt Katmai in 1912);
- We in fact are only guessing at how such an immensely complex thing as the biosphere would actually respond to this, as this involves delving into chaotic chain reactions that are completely beyond our grasp;
- And of course, the use of such a technology would not at all solve the root cause of the climate crisis: namely, our failed economic and social system.
In fact, as Klein points out, the “strange paradox of engineering” is that “it is exponentially more ambitious and dangerous than any other engineering project in the past. But it is also very familiar, nearly a cliché, as if the past five hundred years of human history have been leading us, ineluctably, to precisely this place. Unlike cutting our emissions in line with the scientific consensus, succumbing to the logic of geoengineering does not require any change from us; it just requires that we keep doing what we have done for centuries, only much more so.”
While geoengineering doesn’t yet seem like a very workable option today, the main risk is that if it is ever deployed, it would almost certainly be in an atmosphere of collective panic with scarce time for deliberation—the kind of decision that fits with what Klein calls the Shock Doctrine: in desperate times, all opposition melts away, and all manners of high-risk behaviors suddenly seem acceptable. (See this recent article of hers on the relevance of this analysis to the “disaster capitalism” of Trumpian times.)
NASA’s famous “Blue Marble” photo of the earth seen from space, as we know, helped the budding environmentalist movement take form—“as a depiction of Earth’s frailty, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space”. But such a vision of the planet, Klein muses, might in fact have led us to view it as a plaything we can modify to our convenience. “Before those pictures, environmentalism had mostly been intensely local—an earthy thing, not an Earth thing.” (Thoreau and his bean bushes, Rachel Carson and DDT-contaminated worms…) But staring down from above, suddenly “it starts to make a certain kind of sense to shuffle around pollution sources and pollution sinks as if they were pieces on a planet-sized chessboard.”
In a word, we have lost humility before life’s precariousness.
“The notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.”
We keep buying into the Judeo-Christian myth that somehow, “We’re going to be saved”—be it by some kind-hearted billionaire or a wonderful new technology. We still see ourselves as “the super-species, the chosen ones, the God Species.”
***
In the third and final part of this book, Naomi Klein provides an overview of the main grassroots, organized forms of action that are already taking place in different parts of the world, in order to fight off the greed of extractive industries and move on toward better political systems.
She begins by charting the contours of a worldwide “transnational conflict zone” that crops up “with increasing frequency and intensity” wherever fossil fuel industries are attempting to launch new projects: protests, direct action, blocked roads, equipment lockdowns…
“What unites these increasingly interconnected pockets of resistance is the sheer ambition of the mining and fossil fuel companies: the fact that in their quest for high-priced commodities and high-risk “unconventional” fuels, they are pushing relentlessly into countless new territories, regardless of the impact on the local ecology (in particular, local water systems), as well as the fact that many of the industrial activities in question have neither been adequately tested nor regulated, yet have already shown themselves to be extraordinarily accident-prone.”
From Greece to Romania to Canada to the UK to Russia to China to Australia… to the US:
- A global, grassroots, broad-based network has formed against high-risk extreme extraction, creating a socio-political movement seldom seen before in the environmental field;
- This network is driven by a desire for deeper democracy, for local control over resources on which depend collective survival—which goes hand in hand with stopping climate crimes;
- The climate/civilization issue is thus tackled from a different perspective: high-end politics/closed-door lobbying meetings are being replaced by more popular and local forms of action.
Indeed, while poorer and more vulnerable populations have long been exposed to the health and environment issues caused by the activities of extractive industries, the desperate thirst for “unconventional fuel” (such as shale oil for example) is suddenly putting “everyone in the sacrifice zone”—including much wealthier or better-connected populations. Thus the international aspects of Blockadia, which isn’t simple NIMBYism but rather, Ni ici, ni aileurs.
“If each of us loved our homeplace enough to defend it, there would be no ecological crisis, no place could ever be written off as a sacrifice zone. We would simply have no choice but to adopt nonpoisonous methods of meeting our needs.”
In a word, extractive industries now have to contend with increasingly vocal and angry citizens no longer ready to delegate power to big environmental NGOs to negotiate on their behalf, and to balance “acceptable pollution risks” against economic growth.
Klein also discusses the first successes and ambitions of the Divestment movement, of which she has been a keen proponent (as part of her work at 350.org), and which has notably been strongly supported by The Guardian. This movement aims at persuading public interest organizations (such as universities, pension funds, charitable foundations, etc.) to withdraw all investments they have in fossil fuel companies—basically, to sell their shares. Obviously, even if all public-minded people did that, it wouldn’t be enough to make the likes of ExxonMobil go financially bankrupt; rather, the point is to bankrupt their reputation and political power, so as to finally confer the same status as tobacco companies. Divestment is thus the first stage of a delegitimization process. (Besides, divestment should be followed by ‘reinvestment’ on behalf of those same groups, into cleaner energy and other initiatives to facilitate a swifter transition to a post-fossil fuels world.)
The problem is, even when governments do listen to angry citizens and environmental organizations, and try to regulate the extraction of fossil fuels, they are often at risk of being sued by corporations under the investor-state dispute settlement provisions contained in the free trade treaties signed between various countries (like CETA, for instance, which Canadians and Europeans might soon have the great pleasure of being officially a part of). This is especially true of resources mined to be exported abroad, as under trade law, it’s illegal for a government to stop the export of such resources once they have been mined. No wonder, then, that corporate trade challenges against governments have been increasing together with the citizen mobilization of “Blockadia.”
Klein makes the point that trade deals are actually “only as powerful as governments allow them to be”: she sees many ways for governments to “fight back” against the backlash that upset investors might unleash over them. While this may be true of the more powerful governments, the Greek debacle of 2015 — although not strictly speaking a matter of fossil fuels extraction or ISDS tribunals — does indicate how difficult it can now be for the democratically elected government of a smaller country to fight off global pro-free-trade organizations, be they the EU, the IMF or the WTO.
In any case, states aren’t even trying to fight back. On the contrary, after failing to convince communities that their land should be used for fracking or to build a pipeline, states often team up with corporate lawyers to criminalize opposition, sometimes going so far as calling protestors “terrorists.”
“The total failure of climate negociations serves to highlight the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society. The interests of financial capital and the oil industry are much more important than the democratic will of people around the world. In the global neoliberal society, profit is more important than life.”
– Edgardo Lander, Venezuelan political scientist
But beyond mobilizing and standing in the way of extractive industries, what else should climate activists from richer countries be focusing on? The key is to provide tangible alternatives to fossil fuels. Otherwise, it remains too easy for these industries to play on people’s economic desperation, and pretend there’s “no other way.”
In a word, “The climate movement can’t just say no, without simultaneously fighting for many transformative yeses.” This movement needs to prove over and over again that a new economy, based on decentralized and renewable energy sources, can actually create many more permanent jobs, as well as a social safety net, than coal, oil and gas. Investing in renewable energy infrastructure may create up to 34 times more jobs than spending the same sum into building a pipeline, contrary to what some may think.
But most importantly, activists today don’t have a choice between fighting the system and building alternatives to it, like they may have had in the 1960s for instance (anti-war movement in cities versus “drop-out” communes in the countryside). Even remote, idyllic places, where people may live in harmonious places growing organic vegetables, cannot escape the threat of climate change.
“In short, dropping out and planting vegetables is not an option for this generation. There can be no more green museums because the fossil fuels runaway train is coming for us one way or another. There may have been a time when engaging in resistance against a life-threatening system and building alternatives to that system could be meaningfully separated, but today we have to do both simultaneously. … Resistance and alternatives are the twin strands of the DNA of social change. One without the other is useless.”
Klein also touches upon the question of rich countries’ climate debt, which they still overwhelmingly refuse to pay poorer countries—despite the fact that it’s actually part of a much greater debt, mostly contracted during the process of slavery, colonization, and the vast plunder of resources that ensued. “All of these various suppressed and neglected debts are not separate from one another but are better understood as different chapters in the same, continuous story.”
Indeed, rich countries have emitted much more greenhouse gases over the course of their industrialization than poorer countries ever have, yet; the impacts of climate change triggered by these emissions will hit these poorer countries hardest; and European and American industrialization was fueled by slavery and the extraction of resources from colonized territories. And this whole process was “supercharged” by the power of coal, a relentless and predictable fuel, “allowing human labor and natural resources to be extracted at much higher rates and laying down the bones of the modern global economy.”
And now, “with many of the biggest pools of untapped carbon on lands controlled by some of the poorest people on the planet, and with emissions rising most rapidly in what were, until recently, some of the poorest parts of the world, there is simply no credible way forward that does not involve redressing the real roots of poverty.”
(The Paris Agreement plans for developed countries to raise $100 billion per year in climate funding by 2020. Certainly not a very ambitious goal, but it now seems all the more difficult to reach due to Trump’s intention to slash the US contribution to it)
The author concludes this part of her book by drawing a moving parallel between environmental and human fertility, which was largely inspired by her personal experience. The extractivist mindset threatens both:
“As a culture, we do a very poor job of protecting, valuing, or even noticing fertility—not just among humans, but across life’s spectrum. Indeed vast amounts of money and cutting-edge technology are devoted to practices that actively interfere with the life cycle. We have a global agricultural model that has succeeded in making it illegal for farmers to engage in the age-old practice of saving seeds, the building blocks of life, so that new seeds have to be repurchased each year. And we have a global energy model that values fossil fuels over water, where all life begins and without which no life can survive.
Our economic system, meanwhile, does not value women’s reproductive labor, pays caregivers miserably, teachers almost as badly, and we generally hear about female reproduction only when men are trying to regulate it.”
The extraction and processing of fossil fuels leads to major increases in birth defects in humans and other living beings; as for the disruptions brought about by climate change, they affect first and foremost the young in most species.
One of the foremost fertility issues linked to fossil fuels and extractivism is that of the topsoil. Due to intensive industrial monoculture, the fertile topsoil is being washed away all around the planet. and this loss is compensated by the use of always more chemical fertilizers and pestices, which in turn pollute rivers and oceans, spreading the chain of infertility further down (some of the chemicals are endoctrine disruptors, like atrazine, which causes sterility in many species). Not to mention threatening the survival of honeybees. According to research, this loss of topsoil could mean we barely have 60 years of harvests left.
The solution: move massively and globally to agro-ecology techniques, which among many advantage, boast far better productivity than monoculture by combining different crops on a single plot of land, requires far less pesticides, and on top of that stores more carbon into the ground.
In the end, we should be creating systems that amplify diversity and favor life and regeneration, instead of depleting everything around us. We need more seed varieties, more sources of energy and clean water. Living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on sources that can be continuously regenerated.
In the conclusion to her book, Naomi Klein stresses the need for a mass social movement to be born in order to bring about change on the scale required, and within the very tight timeframe still available to us. We simply don’t have the time to wait for climate conferences and post-democratic governments to act, especially when what is at stake is not only mere economic reform, but also a radical and widespread change of worldview.
She therefore proceeds to examine what mass social movements in the past have successfully tackled both legal/cultural issues and economic policymaking simultaneously, on a comparable change:
- The post-Great Depression labor movement, which lead to a massive wave of unionization, the forced sharing of wealth, and social programs (the New Deal).
- The fight for abolition of slavery, which beyond the obvious human aspect also entailed massive economic impacts on the slave owners (most of whom were actually compensated, contrary to the slaves themselves).
- And the decolonization movements around the world.
Those movements were successful to different degrees, but generally more on the aspect of culture than economics, or vice-versa. So the climate movement should place itself in the continuity of these unfinished liberation movements (including the Civil Rights, Feminist or Indigenous Sovereignty causes) that are still fighting today.
“As the furthest-reaching crisis created by the extractivist worldview, and one that puts humanity on a firm and unyielding deadline, climate change can be the force, the grand push, that will bring together all of these still living movements. A rushing river fed by countless streams, gathering collective force to finally reach the sea.”
What should we do to make this happen?
- Bring about extraordinary levels of social mobilization, to collapse borders between “activists” and “normal people”. Activism has to become an “entirely normal activity throughout society” — practiced in clubs, trade unions, sports teams, youth leagues, etc.
- Break down rules written in law and trade agreements, but also strongly and consistently advocate a new worldview, to challenge unwritten assumptions taken for granted everywhere: humans are more than discrete, gratification-seeking units, disconnected from land and community. The new worldview must rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis: interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, cooperation rather than hierarchy.
- Reach a state of critical mobilization powerful enough to provoke “rapid-fire lawmaking” — because fundamental systemic change doesn’t come in dribs and drabs spread out over time. Again, the New Deal period or the environmental legislations of the 1960s-70s come to mind.
- Be unafraid to speak the language of morality and dreams, in order to liberate the political imagination.
And finally, be ready to seize all chances to make change happen.
“There is little doubt that another crisis will see us in the streets and squares once again, taking us all by surprise. The real question is what progressive forces will make of that moment, the power and confidence with which it will be seized. Because these moments when the impossible seems suddenly possible are excruciatingly rare and precious. That means more must be made of them. The next time one arises, it must be harnessed not only to denounce the world as it is, and build fleeting pockets of liberated space. It must be the catalyst to actually build the world that will keep us safe. The stakes are simply too high, and time too short, to settle for anything less.”