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by
Naomi Klein
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September 23, 2019 - January 19, 2020
“How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.” —Victor Hugo, 1840
“cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.”
The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
“To the extent people prioritize values and goals such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources unsustainably,” write Kasser and British environmental strategist Tom Crompton in their 2009 book, Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity.66 In
Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And together these pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response to climate change for decades.
It’s not that the companies moving their production to China wanted to drive up emissions: they were after the cheap labor, but exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal. A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.
Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system’s goal.
In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.
the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.
Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing.
a term to capture the particular form of psychological distress that sets in when the homelands that we love and from which we take comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on “solastalgia,” with its evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.”
The nation’s remoteness made it a convenient trash can—a place to turn the land into trash, to launder dirty money, to disappear unwanted people, and now a place that may be allowed to disappear altogether.21 This is our relationship to much that we cannot easily see and it is a big part of what makes carbon pollution such a stubborn problem: we can’t see it, so we don’t really believe it exists.
Authoritarian socialism and capitalism share strong tendencies toward centralizing (one in the hands of the state, the other in the hands of corporations). They also both keep their respective systems going through ruthless expansion—whether through production for production’s sake, in the case of Soviet-era socialism, or consumption for consumption’s sake, in the case of consumer capitalism.
What is needed, writes Bolivian environmentalist Patricia Molina, is a new definition of development, “so that the goal is the elimination of poverty, and not of the poor.”
In the mid-1800s, Henry David Thoreau wrote that, “The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me.”*
Aldo Leopold, whose book A Sand County Almanac was the touchstone for a second wave of environmentalists, similarly called for an ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals” and that recognizes “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” A “land ethic,” as he called it, “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”50
to Lovelock’s theory that the earth is “one single enormous living organism and every single part of the ecosystem reacted with every other part”).
Richard Branson got at least one thing right. He showed us the kind of bold model that has a chance of working in the tight time frame left: the profits from our dirtiest industries must be diverted into the grand and hopeful project of cleaning up their mess. But if there is one thing Branson has demonstrated, it is that it won’t happen on a voluntary basis or on the honor system. It will have to be legislated—using the kinds of tough regulations, higher taxes, and steeper royalty rates these sectors have resisted all along.
some of the people pushing geoengineering see these technologies not as emergency bridges away from fossil fuels, but as a means to keep the fossil fuel frenzy going for as long as possible.
Proponents of fossil and nuclear energy constantly tell us that renewables are not “reliable,” by which they mean that they require us to think closely about where we live, to pay attention to things like when the sun shines and when the wind blows, where and when rivers are fierce and where they are weak.* And it’s true: renewables, at least the way Henry Red Cloud sees them, require us to unlearn the myth that we are the masters of nature—the “God Species”—and embrace the fact that we are in relationship with the rest of the natural world. But ours is a new level of relationship, one based
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wealthy countries do not just need to help the Global South move to a low-emissions economic path because it’s the right thing to do. We need to do it because our collective survival depends on it. At the same time, we need common agreement that having been wronged does not grant a country the right to repeat the same crime on an even grander scale. Just as having been raped does not bestow the right to rape, or having been robbed the right to steal, having been denied the opportunity to choke the atmosphere with pollution in the past does not grant anyone the right to choke it today.
She described Anishinaabe systems as “a way of living designed to generate life, not just human life but the life of all living things.” This is a concept of balance, or harmony, common to many Indigenous cultures and is often translated to mean “the good life.”
The earth, wrote the great ecologist Stan Rowe, is not merely “resource” but “source.”
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 diminished.”39
And it’s an expression of the understanding that from here on, when we take, we must not only give back, but we must also take care.
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented society’ to a ‘person-oriented society.’ When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” —Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” 19671
the world tends to look a little different when the objects we have worked our whole lives to accumulate are suddenly floating down the street, or smashed to pieces, turned to garbage.
