Logical, rational and passionate

on the debris left behind by mining, intense fishing and farming.

“And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right,” she adds. No wonder that, in the middle of the book, we find Klein’s feminist credentials burnished, at the heart of Pope Francis’ Vatican as she helps advise him on how to raise consciousness of the immorality of what we are doing to the planet.

She explains that the slave-owners and traders, factory bosses and colonial cowboys of previous centuries developed a rationale to deal with critics of their brutal behaviour — now paralleled by our callous disregarding of victims of climate change who flee their chaotic homes, and indifference to the catastrophic climatic calamities of stricken, third-world nations.

She scorns the savage immigration policies of Australia and, increasingly, the United States as much as she reviles Justin Trudeau and the smug Canadians who preside over the toxic Alberta tar sands pipeline as it devastates the landscape and promises more environmental ravages when it reaches the atmosphere.

Yet Klein’s is essentially a message of optimism. “We were born for this moment,” she proclaims as she spells out an eight-point plan she claims will save us. This is a new, green revolution to create jobs in renewable fuel industries; spread a fairer society with an FDR style New Deal; a kind of Marshall plan to halt the destruction of our world and, with a raft of community-based changes, challenge rapacious capitalist markets with a simpler and fairer system.

On Fire is a book for our era, a timely reminder of how the world economy has developed and what this will mean for our children

Anne Garvey is a freelance writer