A commitment to hope
In her latest book, Naomi Klein wanted to discuss climate change with urgency but not despair
If we do nothing, if we stay on the road we’re on, it’s not like we’ll just stay like we are now except with things getting a little hotter. Things aren’t just going to get hotter. They’re going to get a lot more brutal, because that’s the way our economic system as it stands deals with crisis.
NAOMI KLEIN AUTHOR OF THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: CAPITALISM VS. THE CLIMATE
Talking with Naomi Klein one-toone is like reading one of her books, but to the nth degree. The experience might be overwhelming if it weren’t so bracing and, in the end, so inspiring.
Tributes on a book’s dust jacket are best taken with a few grains of salt, but in the case of the encomia on This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Random House Canada, 139 pp, $25), the big claim — “Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes book that redefines its era” — could stand up in court. No Logo provided a rallying point for the millennial anti-corporate movement just as that movement was coming up from the underground in 2000; The Shock Doctrine (2007) exposed how disasters like Hurricane Katrina are exploited to reinforce entrenched environment- hostile interests. Now, at a time when projections of global warming’s effects are growing more dire seemingly by the week, Klein is back with a book that is already becoming a focal point for arguments around our most pressing problem.
Klein, 44, was born in Montreal, the daughter of activists who had left the United States in protest against the Vietnam War. Her mother suffered a stroke when Naomi was 17, precipitating a family move to B.C. — “a place of kinder winters,” Klein said. In Montreal for the new book’s official Canadian launch (“It always feels a little strange to come back to Montreal, because although this is the city of my birth, I don’t have any family left here”), she’s set to embark what’s sure to be a long and intensive campaign in which activism and book promotion are essentially one and the same.
“Like a lot of people, for a long time I looked away from this issue,” she said of climate change. “It’s not that I was denying it. ‘Averting my eyes’ is the best way I can describe it. I decided to write about it only when I could see a way to do it that wasn’t just doom and gloom.”
Even more than the first two books, the new one is infused with a sense of urgency, sparked by voluminous scientific proof that if rising temperatures aren’t held within a limit of two further degrees Celsius, the results will be incalculably calamitous within 20 years. A sharp dose of what Klein has called “hope and fear in equal measure” is clearly called for, and that’s what This Changes Everything provides.
As Klein describes it, a window of opportunity for large-scale progressive environmental strategies was presented with the signing of the UN climate convention in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, but the momentum was soon lost, scuppered by a confluence of post-Cold War free-market forces, the lowest-common-denominator machinations of the World Trade Organization, and that old standby, broken government promises. Among many other things.
What makes This Changes Everything so valuable is that, without downplaying all the forces arrayed against the reduction of carbon emissions — indeed, there will be points where you might have to put the book down in despair — it still posits plausible ways out. Seizing the opportunity back, says Klein, is going to be not so much one big battle as a huge but winnable array of smaller ones, best fought on local fronts. As she does better than anyone working roughly the same turf, Klein marshals a vast amount of thoroughly documented research — she’s aware that her detractors will be combing the text for inconsistencies — and injects it with an idealist’s passion.
The result is work that can bolster the campaigners, scare the fence-sitters into action, and serve as a marker for what’s possible.
Though there were some obstacles to overcome before the project got off the ground, for Klein the writing of This Changes Everything arose logically from the experience of researching and writing The Shock Doctrine.
“That image of people on their roofs in New Orleans holding signs that said ‘Help!’ — I worried that that was a glimpse of the future we were creating, what I described at the time as climate apartheid: if you have money you can save yourself, but if you’re poor and you depend on the state, you get left behind. So I guess in a way this book is a response to that, a way to ask, ‘What if there was a Peoples’ Shock instead of a Shock Doctrine in response to climate change?’, and an attempt to sketch out what that might look like. If we do nothing, if we stay on the road we’re on, it’s not like we’ll just stay like we are now except with things getting a little hotter. Things aren’t just going to get hotter. They’re going to get a lot more brutal, because that’s the way our economic system as it stands deals with crisis.”
The first tentative strokes in Klein’s sketch were inspired by a 2009 meeting in Geneva with Angelica Navarro Llanos, the Bolivian ambassador to the WTO.
“I was interviewing her for an article,” Klein recalled, “and she explained to me how she thought that climate change could be a catalyst for turning the world right-side-up — how, if we were to get serious about responding to the fact that the economic system is destabilizing life on Earth, it could transform so many things that are wrong with our economic system — it could reduce inequality, it could strengthen our public sphere, it could create many many good jobs. It was a really inspiring vision. It was the first time I could see a way into this topic that wasn’t just depressing.”
Keenly aware that she commands a huge readership, Klein is clearly determined to make the most of the opportunity her platform provides.
“It’s important to me that the books be useful to movements, and I’ve always been lucky in that my books have come out during movement moments. But this book was tricky, because I didn’t see the signs of momentum toward the kind of climate movement that we would need to change things in time. I didn’t know who the book was for. But that really started to change in the last three years of writing the book, because there was an explosion of grassroots activism — people taking on pipelines, the rise of the fossil fuels divestment movement on university campuses. I started to feel like we were about to hit another movement moment. And once I knew who the book was for, I could really write and sustain the hope necessary to write. Because without movements, there’s no point.”
Of the many case studies provided in This Changes Everything, one of the closest to home is Klein’s account of the situation in the oilsands around Fort McMurray. It’s also a good example of how a dire present situation could conceivably be turned around with some timely nudges in the right direction.
“There’s this idea that if you’re getting work from an industry then your interests are entirely aligned with that industry, but that’s simply not the case,” said Klein. “The real success of the fossil fuel industry has been managing to equate, in the minds of many people, their very profitable interests with the interests of all Canadians, and certainly all Albertans. There’s nobody (in northern Alberta) whose life is not impacted, and in some way economically dependent on, the oilsands, and that includes some of the most vocal critics of it.
“But I believe there’s a growing recognition that the skill set being used right now to extract bitumen is in many ways the same skill set, the very same workers, who would be getting jobs in an energy transition economy that was moving away from extraction and towards renewable energy. When I participated last year in the Tarsands Healing Walk (an annual awareness-raising initiative organized by local First Nations activists) I was really amazed that about a third of the trucks that passed us on the road honked their horns in support.”
This Changes Everything shifts into an unexpected gear in its penultimate chapter, where Klein details her long struggle with fertility — an odyssey that had a happy ending when she and partner Avi Lewis conceived their first child, daughter Toma, two years ago.
Klein admittedly temporarily moved to the Sunshine Coast of B.C. to safeguard her health while being pregnant.
The affecting account gives the book a personal dimension that wasn’t there in the first two; it also underlines just how readable Klein can be, a quality without which all her activism would be nowhere near so effective. Putting this material in the book can’t have been an easy decision, I ventured.
“It was very difficult,” she said. “I was having trouble getting started with the writing, and I thought maybe it was because I needed to write about this experience that I was going through. The five years of writing the book were the five years in my personal life that I was going through this battle with fertility: I lost several pregnancies, went through intense treatments, and finally went a completely different route and got lucky and got pregnant and had my first child. I was trying to keep these worlds segregated, because I usually don’t write personally. It can seem narcissistic, when writing about a big theme, to be relating it to oneself.
“But I found that because this was what was consuming my brain, and my heart, I needed to write about it. So I did. At the time I thought it probably wouldn’t go in the book, that I’d publish it as an essay on its own. But I showed it to my editors and other people who felt really strongly that I should include it, so it’s there, and I’m finding that people are responding strongly to it, in some ways more strongly than to anything else in the book.”