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Naomi Klein: 'Ferocious Love' and the Climate Fight To Come
If there's a way to adequately condense the central tenet of Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, it's the observation that just as the rise of global greenhouse gas emissions coincided with the emergence of neoliberal globalization as the dominant economic paradigm in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it's also possible that the growing and various social movements that have been building up to counter those dual forces are now converging at just the right moment to help save us from the destructive path humanity now walks.
"Climate change," writes Klein in the new book, released today in the US and Canada, "pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustains itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shatter communities, this is it."
It is this urgency that brings the book back—again and again—to the idea that though the challenge has never been greater, there remain great lessons to be learned (and attitudes copied) from those who have already taken the step of recognizing the scale of what's at stake and decided not to look away. Rather than avoiding the harsh realities of what a warming planet might mean for the future of society, they have decided to stare the crisis in the face, to stop waiting, to dig in, and fight back.
Indeed, the hero of the book is quite clearly the global grassroots climate justice movement which has been building its nerve (and nerve centers) despite being largely ignored—and often ridiculed—by those who have resolved to largely shrug off the growing crisis of global warming since it first entered the public consciousness in the 1980s.
What Klein and others have come to call "Blockadia"—the resistance movement that has been blocking pipelines, opposing new extraction projects, and quite willingly putting bodies on the line—is the moral antidote to world leaders who have repeatedly crumbled before the pressures exerted by the fossil fuel industry, the promise of unfettered trade, and the mantra of free marketeers.
"The power of this ferocious love is what the resource companies and their advocates in government inevitably underestimate, precisely because no amount of money can extinguish it." —Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
"Climate change," writes Klein in the new book, released today in the US and Canada, "pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustains itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shatter communities, this is it."
It is this urgency that brings the book back—again and again—to the idea that though the challenge has never been greater, there remain great lessons to be learned (and attitudes copied) from those who have already taken the step of recognizing the scale of what's at stake and decided not to look away. Rather than avoiding the harsh realities of what a warming planet might mean for the future of society, they have decided to stare the crisis in the face, to stop waiting, to dig in, and fight back.
Indeed, the hero of the book is quite clearly the global grassroots climate justice movement which has been building its nerve (and nerve centers) despite being largely ignored—and often ridiculed—by those who have resolved to largely shrug off the growing crisis of global warming since it first entered the public consciousness in the 1980s.
What Klein and others have come to call "Blockadia"—the resistance movement that has been blocking pipelines, opposing new extraction projects, and quite willingly putting bodies on the line—is the moral antidote to world leaders who have repeatedly crumbled before the pressures exerted by the fossil fuel industry, the promise of unfettered trade, and the mantra of free marketeers.
http://commondreams.org/news/2014/09/16/naomi-klein-ferocious-love-and-climate-fight-come
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
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