This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Members of grassroots groups like the Love Canal Homeowners Association, the Bhopal Action Resource Group, and the National Toxics Campaign handed out pamphlets that read in part, “Who is destroying the earth—are we all equally to blame? No! We say go to the source. We say take it to Wall Street!” The pamphlets went on: “The polluters would have us believe that we are all just common travelers on Spaceship Earth, when in fact a few of them are at the controls, and the rest of us are choking on their exhaust.”34 This confrontational rhetoric—a foreshadowing of Occupy Wall Street two decades later, as well as the fossil fuel divestment movement—was an explicit critique of the corporate infiltration of the green movement. Daniel Finkenthal, a spokesperson for the anticorporate protests, declared, “Real environmental groups are disgusted with the corporate buyout of Earth Day,” telling one journalist that sponsors are “spending more money on Earth Day promotion than they are on actual corporate reform and the environment.”35