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

by Naomi Klein

very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.

because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire

As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood

It can seem that every single life decision—whether to work at a national NGO or a local permaculture project or a green start-up; whether to work with animals or with people; whether to be a scientist or an artist; whether to go to grad school or have kids—carries the weight of the world.

What I told her is what I will tell you. What you are doing is amazing. And what you do next will be amazing, too. Because you are not alone. You are part of a movement. And that movement

“Nature is filled with words of love,” Francis writes, “but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances?”

responding to the climate crisis requires fundamental changes to our economic model—and I think he is correct—then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.

fighting for the trampled victims of a highly unequal and unjust economic system. When climate justice had to fight for airtime with denunciations of gay marriage, it didn’t stand a chance.

encyclical—“Who turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater

carbon offset market has created a whole new class of green human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree huggers should be seen in this context.I

that don’t ask suffering people to shelve their concerns about war, poverty, and systemic racism and first “save the world,” but that instead demonstrate how all these crises are interconnected, and how the solutions could be, too.

This is because the state of longing for a radically altered homeland, a home that may not even exist any longer, is something that is being rapidly, and tragically, globalized.

are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.

climate refugees aren’t currently recognized under international law.

“disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or

geographical region.” And once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression:

the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as ...

And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent.

These tools—of ranking the relative value of humans—are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.

There must be theories of othering to justify sacrificing an entire geography—theories about the people who lived there being so poor and backward that their lives and culture don’t deserve protection. After all, if you’re a “hillbilly,” who cares about your hills?

part of a system of “cultural genocide.” The trauma associated with these layers of forced separation—from land, from culture, from family—is directly linked to the epidemic of despair ravaging so many First Nations communities today.

growth is our religion, our way of life. So, even Justin Trudeau, Canada’s woke young prime minister, is bound and determined to build new fossil fuel projects—new mines, new

a system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless intellectual theories that justify their sacrifice exist and persist: from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to Manifest Destiny to terra nullius to Orientalism, from backward hillbillies to backward Indians.

told we have altered the earth so much and on such a planetary scale that we are now living in the Anthropocene, the age of man.

Faustian

A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat.

climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or are among the thirty-six million who, according to the United Nations, are facing hunger due to drought in southern and East Africa.

that we are all affected by climate change and must take action together and in solidarity with one another. But

context of austerity and privatization, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so often, resistance to them is highly compartmentalized. The

Too many of us fail to make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world.

Overcoming these disconnections, strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements, is, I would argue, the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice.

but it can also be an accelerant for the opposite, for the forces working for economic and social justice and against militarism.

Because home isn’t just the UK, home is everywhere on this planet.

It can be painful to look too closely at the stories that make us feel good, especially when they are part of the intimate narratives that mold our identities. I

The stories we tell about who we are as a nation, and the values that define us, are not fixed. They change as facts change. They change as the balance of power in society changes. Which is why regular people, not just governments, need to be active participants in this process of retelling and reimagining our collective stories, symbols, and histories.

change the collective story or, more accurately, to lift up older stories that are still alive but are usually drowned out by the barrage of louder, newer messages we receive day in and day out.

true, resolving to do more to live up to them is also healthy. But when they no longer serve us, when they stand in the way of where we need to go, then we need to be willing to let them rest and tell some different stories.

cross section of movements: labor, climate, faith, Indigenous, migrant, women, antipoverty, anti-incarceration, food justice, housing rights, transit, and green tech. The

kick-start a rapid shift to a renewables-based economy. For a long time, we had been told that we had to choose between

“yes” coalition. And that meant we needed to create a space to do something we never do, which is dream together about the world that we actually want.

of the clearest themes was the need to move from the national narrative that many of us had grown up with, that was based on a supposedly divine right to endlessly extract from the natural world as if there were no limit and no such thing as a breaking point.

duty to care: to care for the land, water, air—and to care for one another.

Green New Deal, the Great Transition, a Marshall Plan for Planet Earth.

green job to anything useful and enriching to our communities that doesn’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. As one participant said, “Nursing is renewable energy. Education is renewable energy.”

key plank in the Leap Manifesto is what is known as “energy democracy,” the idea that renewable energy, whenever possible, should be public- or community-owned and controlled so that the profits and benefits of new industries are far less concentrated than they are with fossil fuels.

back control over their energy grids from private companies, as well as an explosion of green energy cooperatives, where the profits from power generation stay in the community to pay for essential services.

amputate the ecological crises from the economic and social systems that are driving them.

Which is why we decided to reframe migrant rights as a climate justice issue. We clearly stated that we need to open our borders to many more migrants and refugees, and that all workers, regardless of immigration status, should have full labor rights and protections. We

those official national narratives that tell countries what values define them, and the kind of power structures that these narratives nurture and maintain.

dependence on commodities continues to shape the body politic of settler-colonial states like Canada, the United States, and Australia.