[Vision2020] 9-14-19 Guardian Interview: Naomi Klein on Climate Crisis: "It cuts to the heart of the American dream – every generation gets more than the last..."

[Ted Moffett]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/14/naomi-klein-we-are-seeing-the-beginnings-of-the-era-of-climate-barbarism


Natalie Hanman

*Why are you publishing this book now?*
I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too
compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really
strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the
crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the
fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war
that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and
interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.

*The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind
about anything?*
When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge
climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate
crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious
centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to
split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that
is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism
[the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not
reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.

*What’s stopping the left doing this?*
In a North American context, it’s the greatest taboo of all to actually
admit that there are going to be limits. You see that in the way Fox News
has gone after the Green New Deal – they are coming after your hamburgers!
It cuts to the heart of the American dream – every generation gets more
than the last, there is always a new frontier to expand to, the whole idea
of settler colonial nations like ours. When somebody comes along and says,
actually, there are limits, we’ve got some tough decisions, we need to
figure out how to manage what’s left, we’ve got to share equitably – it is
a psychic attack. And so the response [on the left] has been to avoid, and
say no, no, we’re not coming to take away your stuff, there are going to be
all kinds of benefits. And there *are* going to be benefits: we’ll have
more livable cities, we’ll have less polluted air, we’ll spend less time
stuck in traffic, we can design happier, richer lives in so many ways. But
we are going to have to contract on the endless, disposable consumption
side.

*Do you feel encouraged by talk of the Green New Deal?*
I feel a tremendous excitement and a sense of relief, that we are finally
talking about solutions on the scale of the crisis we face. That we’re not
talking about a little carbon tax or a cap and trade scheme as a silver
bullet. We’re talking about transforming our economy. This system is
failing the majority of people anyway, which is why we’re in this period of
such profound political destabilisation – that is giving us the Trumps and
the Brexits, and all of these strongman leaders – so why don’t we figure
out how to change everything from bottom to top, and do it in a way that
addresses all of these other crises at the same time? There is every chance
we will miss the mark, but every fraction of a degree warming that we are
able to hold off is a victory and every policy that we are able to win that
makes our societies more humane, the more we will weather the inevitable
shocks and storms to come without slipping into barbarism. Because what
really terrifies me is what we are seeing at our borders in Europe and
North America and Australia – I don’t think it’s coincidental that the
settler colonial states and the countries that are the engines of that
colonialism are at the forefront of this. We are seeing the beginnings of
the era of climate barbarism. We saw it in Christchurch
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/14/christchurch-attack-suspect-sent-call-to-arms-letter-from-cell>,
we saw it in El Paso
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/04/el-paso-safe-city-white-man-killing-latinos>,
where you have this marrying of white supremacist violence with vicious
anti-immigrant racism.

*That **is one of the most chilling sections of your book: I think* *that’s
a link a lot of people haven’t made.*
This pattern has been clear for a while. White supremacy emerged not just
because people felt like thinking up ideas that were going to get a lot of
people killed but because it was useful to protect barbaric but highly
profitable actions. The age of scientific racism begins alongside the
transatlantic slave trade, it is a rationale for that brutality. If we are
going to respond to climate change by fortressing our borders, then of
course the theories that would justify that, that create these hierarchies
of humanity, will come surging back. There have been signs of that for
years, but it is getting harder to deny because you have killers who are
screaming it from the rooftops.


*One criticism you hear about the environment movement is that it is
dominated by white people**. **How do you address that?*


When you have a movement that is overwhelmingly representative of the most
privileged sector of society then the approach is going to be much more
fearful of change, because people who have a lot to lose tend to be more
fearful of change, whereas people who have a lot to gain will tend to fight
harder for it. That’s the big benefit of having an approach to climate
change that links it to those so called bread and butter issues: how are we
going to get better paid jobs, affordable housing, a way for people to take
care of their families? I have had many conversations with
environmentalists over the years where they seem really to believe that by
linking fighting climate change with fighting poverty, or fighting for
racial justice, it’s going to make the fight harder. We have to get out of
this “my crisis is bigger than your crisis: first we save the planet and
then we fight poverty and racism, and violence against women”. That doesn’t
work. That alienates the people who would fight hardest for change. This
debate has shifted a huge amount in the US because of the leadership of the
climate justice movement and because it is congresswomen of colour who are
championing the Green New Deal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-met-greta-thunberg-hope-contagious-climate>
, Ilhan Omar <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ilhan-omar>, Ayanna
Pressley
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2018/nov/07/ayanna-pressley-massachusetts-first-black-congresswoman>
 and Rashida Tlaib
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/14/rashida-tlaib-holocaust-israel-palestine-comments-democrats-defend-context-republican-attack>
come
from communities that have gotten such a raw deal under the years of
neoliberalism and longer, and are determined to represent, truly represent,
the interests of those communities. They’re not afraid of deep change
because their communities desperately need it.

*In the book, you write: “The hard truth is that the answer to the question
‘What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?’ is: nothing.” Do
you still believe that?*
In terms of the carbon, the individual decisions that we make are not going
to add up to anything like the kind of scale of change that we need. And I
do believe that the fact that for so many people it’s so much more
comfortable to talk about our own personal consumption, than to talk about
systemic change, is a product of neoliberalism, that we have been trained
to see ourselves as consumers first. To me that’s the benefit of bringing
up these historical analogies, like the New Deal or the Marshall Plan – it
brings our minds back to a time when we were able to think of change on
that scale. Because we’ve been trained to think very small. It is
incredibly significant that Greta Thunberg
<https://www.theguardian.com/profile/greta-thunberg> has turned her life
into a living emergency.

*Yes, she set sail **for the UN climate summit in New York on a zero carbon
yacht ...*
Exactly. But this isn’t about what Greta is doing as an individual. It’s
about what Greta is broadcasting in the choices that she makes as an
activist, and I absolutely respect that. I think it’s magnificent. She is
using the power that she has to broadcast that this is an emergency, and
trying to inspire politicians to treat it as an emergency. I don’t think
anybody is exempt from scrutinising their own decisions and behaviours but
I think it is possible to overemphasise the individual choices. I have made
a choice – and this has been true since I wrote *No Logo*, and I started
getting these “what should I buy, where should I shop, what are the ethical
clothes?” questions. My answer continues to be that I am not a lifestyle
adviser, I am not anyone’s shopping guru, and I make these decisions in my
own life but I’m under no illusion that these decisions are going to make
the difference.

*Some people are choosing to go on birth strikes. What do you think about
that?*
I’m happy these discussions are coming into the public domain as opposed to
being furtive issues we’re afraid to talk about. It’s been very isolating
for people. It certainly was for me. One of the reasons I waited as long as
I did to try and get pregnant, and I would say this to my partner all the
time – what, you want to have a Mad Max water warrior fighting with their
friends for food and water? It wasn’t until I was part of the climate
justice movement and I could see a path forward that I could even imagine
having a kid. But I would never tell anybody how to answer this most
intimate of questions. As a feminist who knows the brutal history of forced
sterilisation and the ways in which women’s bodies become battle zones when
policymakers decide that they are going to try and control population, I
think that the idea that there are regulatory solutions when it comes to
whether or not to have kids is catastrophically ahistorical. We need to be
struggling with our climate grief together and our climate fears together,
through whatever decision we decide to make, but the discussion we need to
have is how do we build a world so that those kids can have thriving,
zero-carbon lives?

*Over the summer, you encouraged people to read Richard Powers’s novel, **The
Overstory**. Wh**y?*
It’s been incredibly important to me and I’m happy that so many people have
written to me since. What Powers is writing about trees
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/08/the-overstory-richard-powers-review>:
that trees live in communities and are in communication, and plan and react
together, and we’ve been completely wrong in the way we conceptualise them.
It’s the same conversation we’re having about whether we are going to solve
this as individuals or whether we are going to save the collective
organism. It’s also rare, in good fiction, to valorise activism, to treat
it with real respect, failures and all, to acknowledge the heroism of the
people who put their bodies on the line. I thought Powers did that in a
really extraordinary way.


*What are you views on what Extinction Rebellion has achieved?*One thing
they have done so well is break us out of this classic campaign model we
have been in for a long time, where you tell someone something scary, you
ask them to click on something to do something about it, you skip out the
whole phase where we need to grieve together and feel together and process
what it is that we just saw. Because what I hear a lot from people is, ok,
maybe those people back in the 1930s or 40s could organise neighbourhood by
neighbourhood or workplace by workplace but we can’t. We believe we’ve been
so downgraded as a species that we are incapable of that. The only thing
that is going to change that belief is getting face to face, in community,
having experiences, off our screens, with one another on the streets and in
nature, and winning some things and feeling that power.

*You talk about stamina in the book. How do you keep going**? **Do you feel
hopeful?*
I have complicated feelings about the hope question. Not a day goes by that
I don’t have a moment of sheer panic, raw terror, complete conviction that
we are doomed, and then I do pull myself out of it. I’m renewed by this new
generation that is so determined, so forceful. I’m inspired by the
willingness to engage in electoral politics, because my generation, when we
were in our 20s and 30s, there was so much suspicion around getting our
hands dirty with electoral politics that we lost a lot of opportunities.
What gives me the most hope right now is that we’ve finally got the vision
for what we want instead, or at least the first rough draft of it. This is
the first time this has happened in my lifetime. And also, I did decide to
have kids. I have a seven year old who is so completely obsessed and in
love with the natural world. When I think about him, after we’ve spent an
entire summer talking about the role of salmon in feeding the forests where
he was born in British Columbia, and how they are linked to the health of
the trees and the soil and the bears and the orcas and this entire
magnificent ecosystem, and I think about what it would be like to have to
tell him that there are no more salmon, it kills me. So that motivates me.
And slays me.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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