On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

by Naomi Klein

One last connection I will mention has to do with the concept of “repair.” The resolution calls for creating well-paying jobs, “restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems,” and “cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites.” There are many such sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to rot after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. It’s a lot like how this culture treats people. It’s certainly how we have been trained to treat our stuff—use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more. It’s similar to what has been done to so many workers in the neoliberal period: they are used up and then abandoned to addiction and despair. It’s what the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of the population who are more economically valuable as prison laborers and numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free workers. There is a grand story to be told here about the duty to repair—to repair our relationship with the earth and with one another. Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mind-set, by a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call i...