This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Carrying a baby is one of the hardest physical tasks we can ask of ourselves, she pointed out, and if our bodies decline the task, it is often a sign that they are facing too many other demands—high-stress work that keeps us in a near constant state of “fight or flight,” perhaps, or the physical stress of having to metabolize toxins or allergens, or just the stresses of modern life (or some combination of all of the above). With the body in overdrive fending off these real and perceived threats, it can start sending signals that it does not have the excess energy necessary to build and nourish a whole new life.

I still traveled for research, though—and when I did, I often noticed parallels between my new doctor’s theories about infertility and some of the ideas I was encountering about the changes humanity must make if we are to avoid collapse. Her advice had pretty much boiled down to this: before you can take care of another human being you have to take care of yourself. In a sense she was saying that I had to give myself some fallow time, as opposed to the mechanistic “push harder” approach that dominates Western medicine.

I thought of this advice when I left my hideout and traveled to the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, one of the most exciting living laboratories for cutting-edge, agro-ecological farming methods. Wes Jackson, the founder and president of the center, says that he is trying to solve what

he calls “the 10,000-year-old problem of agriculture.”29 That problem, in essence, is that ever since humans started planting seeds and tilling fields, they have been stripping the soil of its fertility. Without human interference, plants grow in different varieties next to one another and as perennials, reseeding themselves year after year, with their roots staying put and growing ever longer and deeper. This combination of diversity and perennialism keeps soil healthy, stable, and fertile: the roots hold the soil in place, the plants allow rain water to be more safely slowly absorbed, and different plants provide different fertility functions (some, like legumes and clover, are better at fixing nitrogen, critical to forming the building blocks of plant life), while diversity controls pests and invasive weeds. It’s a self-sustaining cycle, with decomposing plants serving as natural fertilizer for new plants and the life cycle being constantly renewed. Maintaining this cycle, according to the farmer and philosopher Wendell Berry, must be the centerpiece of humanity’s relationship with nature. “The problem of...

But when humans started planting single crops that needed to be replanted year after year, the problem of fertility loss began. The way industrial agriculture deals with this problem is well known: irrigate heavily to make up for the fact that annual plants do a poor job of retaining moisture (a growing problem as fresh water becomes more scarce), and lay on the chemicals, both to fertilize and ward off invasive pests and weeds. This in turn creates a host of new environmental and health problems, including massive aquatic dead zones caused by agricultural runoff. In other words, rather than solving the fertility problem in the soil, we have simply moved it, transforming a land-based crisis into an ocean-based one. And the chain of infertility is longer still because some of the chemicals used in industrial farming are endocrine disruptors such as the herb killer atrazine, which research shows causes sterility in amphibians, fish, reptiles, and rats—as well as triggering bizarre spontaneous sex changes in male frogs. And these same chemicals have been linked to increa...

Because the truth is that humans are marvelously resilient, capable of adapting to all manner of setbacks. We are built to survive, gifted with adrenaline and embedded with multiple biological redundancies that allow us the luxury of second, third, and fourth chances. So are our oceans. So is the atmosphere. But surviving is not the same as thriving, not the same as living well. And as we have seen, for a great many species it’s not the same as being able to nurture and produce new life. Just because biology is full of generosity does not mean its forgiveness is limitless. With proper care, we stretch and bend amazingly well. But we break too—our individual bodies, as well as the communities and ecosystems that support us.

What is emerging, in fact, is a new kind of reproductive rights movement, one fighting not only for the reproductive rights of women, but for the reproductive rights of the planet as a whole—for the decapitated mountains, the drowned valleys, the clear-cut forests, the fracked water tables, the strip-mined hillsides, the poisoned rivers, the “cancer villages.” All of life has the right to renew, regenerate, and heal itself. Based on this principle, countries like Bolivia and Ecuador—with large Indigenous populations—have enshrined the “rights of Mother Earth” into law, creating powerful new legal tools that assert the right of ecosystems not only to exist but to

These legal concepts are now being adopted and proposed in non-Indigenous contexts, including in North America and Europe, where increasingly, communities trying to protect themselves from the risks of extreme extraction are passing their own “rights of nature” ordinances. In 2010 the Pittsburgh City Council passed such a law, explicitly banning all natural gas extraction and stating that nature has “inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish” in the city. A

similar effort in Europe is attempting to make ecocide a crime under international law. The campaign defines ecocide as “the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely

As Indigenous-inspired ideas have spread in these somewhat surprising contexts, something else is happening too: many people are remembering their own cultures’ stewardship traditions, however deeply buried, and recognizing humanity’s role as one of life promotion. The notion that we could separate ourselves from nature, that we did not need to be in perpetual partnership with the earth around us, is, after all, a relatively new concept, even in the West.

Living nonextractively does not mean that extraction does not happen: all living things must take from nature in order to survive. But it does mean the end of the extractivist mindset—of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration. Even such traditionally destructive practices as logging can be done responsibly, as can small-scale mining, particularly when the activities are controlled by the people who live where the extraction is taking place and who have a stake in the ongoing health and productivity of the land. But most of all, living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated: deriving our food from farming methods that protect soil fertility; our energy from methods that harness the ever-renewing strength of the sun, wind, and waves; our metals

from recycled and reused sources. These processes are sometimes called “resilient” but a more appropriate term might be “regenerative.” Because resilience—though certainly one of nature’s greatest gifts—is a passive process, implying the ability to absorb blows and get back up. Regeneration, on the other hand, is active: we become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.

But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the “Is Earth f**ked” question, he set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as “resistance”—movements of “people or groups of people” who

“adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.” According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.”

Such mass uprisings of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement—represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an econ...

Put another way, only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on. The only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road, and simultaneously clear some alternate pathways to destinations that are safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything.

Because the carbon record doesn’t lie. And what that record tells us is that emissions are still rising: every year we release more greenhouse gases than the year before, the growth rate increasing from one decade to the next—gases that will trap heat for generations to come, creating a world that is hotter, colder, wetter, thirstier, hungrier, angrier. So if there is any hope of reversing these trends, glimpses won’t cut it; we will need the climate revolution playing on repeat, all day every day, everywhere.

Meeting science-based targets will mean forcing some of the most profitable companies on the planet to forfeit trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground.7 It will also require coming up with trillions more to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations. And let’s take for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don’t have much to offer in the way of road maps.

The crucial question we are left with, then, is this: has an economic shift of this kind ever happened before in history? We know it can happen during wartime, when presidents and prime ministers are the ones commanding the transformation from above. But has it ever been demanded from below, by regular people, when leaders have wholly abdicated their

responsibilities? Having combed through the history of social movements in search of precedents, I must report that the answer to that question is predictably complex, filled with “so...

In the West, the most common precedents invoked to show that social movements really can be a disruptive historical force are the celebrated human rights movements of the past century—most prominently, civil, women’s, and gay and lesbian rights. And these movements unquestionably transformed the face and texture of the dominant culture. But given that the challenge for the climate movement hinges on pulling off a profound and radical economic transformation, it m...

The U.S. civil rights movement, for instance, fought not onl...

segregation and discrimination but also for massive investments in schools and jobs programs that would close the economic gap between blacks and whites once and for all. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that, “The practical cost of change for the nation up ...

And though often forgotten, the more

radical wing of the second-wave feminist movement also argued for fundamental challenges to the free market economic order. It wanted women not only to get equal pay for equal work in traditional jobs but to have their work in the home caring for children and the elderly recognized and compensated as a massive unacknowledged market subsidy—essentially a demand for wealth redistribution on a scale greater than the New Deal.

Sharing legal status is one thing; sharing resources quite another. If there is an exception to this rule it is the huge gains won by the labor movement in the aftermath of the Great Depression—the massive wave of unionization that forced owners to share a great deal more wealth with their workers, which in turn helped create a context to demand ambitious social programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance (programs from which the majority of African American and many women workers were notably excluded). And in response to the market crash of 1929, tough new rules regulating the financial sector were introduced at real cost to unfettered profit making. In the same period, social movement pressure created the conditions for the New Deal and programs like it across the industrialized world.

If the search for historical precedents is extended more globally (an impossibly large task in this context, but worth a try), then the lessons are similarly mixed. Since the 1950s, several democratically elected socialist governments have nationalized large parts of their extractive sectors and begun to redistribute to the poor and middle class the wealth that had previously hemorrhaged into foreign bank accounts, most notably Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. But those experiments were interrupted by foreign-sponsored coups d’état before reaching their potential.

Even the stunningly successful battle against apartheid in South Africa suffered its most significant losses on the economic equality front. The country’s freedom fighters were not, it is worth remembering, only demanding the right to vote and move freely. They were also, as the African National Congress’s official policy platform, the Freedom Charter, made clear, struggling for key sectors of the economy—including the mines and the banks—to be nationalized, with their proceeds used to pay for the social programs that would lift millions in the townships out of poverty. Black South Africans won their core legal and electoral battles, but the wealth accumulated under apartheid remained intact, with poverty deepening significantly in the post-apartheid

There have been social movements,

however, that have succeeded in challenging entrenched wealth in ways that are comparable to what today’s movements must provoke if we are to avert climate catastrophe. These are the movements for the abolition of slavery and for Third World independence from colonial powers. Both of these transformative movements forced ruling elites to relinquish practices that were still extraordinarily profitable, much as fossil fuel extraction is today.

Chris Hayes, in an award-winning 2014 essay titled “The New Abolitionism,” pointed out “the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth” and concluded that “it is impossible to point to any precedent other than

Caribbean sugar plantations, which were wholly dependent on slave labor, were by far the most profitable outposts of the British Empire, generating revenues that far outstripped the other colonies. In Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild quotes enthusiastic slave traders describing the buying and selling of humans as “the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves” and “the foundation of our commerce . . . and first cause of our national industry and riches.”11 While not equivalent, the dependency of the U.S. economy on slave labor—particularly in the Southern states—is certainly comparable to the modern global economy’s reliance on fossil

According to historian Eric Foner, at the start of the Civil War, “slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together.” Strengthening the parallel with fossil fuels, Hayes points out that “in

1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire [United States], which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.” That figure is very roughly similar to the value of the carbon reserves that must be left in the ground worldwid...

But the analogy, as all acknowledge, is far from perfect. Burning fossil fuels is of course not the moral equivalent of owning slaves or occupying countries. (Though heading an oil company that actively sabotages climate science, lobbies aggressively against emission controls while laying claim to enough interred carbon to drown populous nations like Bangladesh and boil sub-Saharan Africa is indeed a heinous moral crime.) Nor were the movements that ended slavery and defeated colonial rule in any way bloodless: nonviolent tactics like boycotts and protests played major roles, but

slavery in the Caribbean was only outlawed after numerous slave rebellions were brutally suppressed, and, of course, abolition in the United States came only after the carnage of the Civil War.

And France, most shockingly, sent a flotilla of warships to demand that the newly liberated nation of Haiti pay a huge sum to the French crown for the loss of its bonded workforce—or face attack.13 Reparations, but in reverse. The costs of these, and so many other gruesomely unjust extortions, are still being paid in lives, from Haiti to Mozambique. The reverse-reparations saddled newly liberated nations and people with odious debts that deprived them of true independence while helping to accelerate Europe’s Industrial Revolution, the extreme profitability of which most certainly cushioned the economic blow of

if climate justice carries the day, the economic costs to our elites will be real—not only because of the carbon left in the ground but also because of the regulations, taxes, and social programs needed to make the required transformation. Indeed, these new demands on the ultra rich could effectively bring the era of the footloose Davos oligarch to a close.

There is, however, another way of looking at this track record: these economic demands—for basic public services that work, for decent housing, for land redistribution—represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat—to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid—is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to follow independence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring the jobs and homes that Martin Luther King

dreamed of; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth.

The fact that our most heroic social justice movements won on the legal front but suffered big losses on the economic front is precisely why our world is as fundamentally unequal and unfair as it remains. Those losses have left a legacy of continued discrimination, double sta...

It must always be remembered that the greatest barrier to humanity rising to meet the climate crisis is not that it is too late or that we don’t know what to do.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith made a case against slavery that had little to do with morality and everything to do with the bottom line. Work by paid laborers, he argued, “comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves”: not only were slave owners responsible for the high costs of the “wear and tear” of their human property but, he claimed, paid laborers had a greater incentive to work hard.16 Many abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic would embrace such pragmatic arguments.

As the historian David Brion Davis writes, abolitionists understood that their role was not merely to ban an abhorrent practice but to try to change the deeply entrenched values that had made slavery acceptable in the first place.

This same understanding about the need to assert the intrinsic value of life is at the heart of all major progressive victories, from universal suffrage to universal health care. Though these movements all contained economic arguments as part of building their case for justice, they did not win by putting a monetary value on granting equal rights and freedoms. They won by asserting that those rights and freedoms were too valuable to be measured and were inherent to each of us.

Similarly, there are plenty of solid economic arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels, as more and more patient investors are realizing. And that’s worth pointing out. But we will not

win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous, since they imply that there is an acceptable price for allowing entire countries to disappear, for leaving untold millions to die on parched land, for...