On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  And there are many more connections to be drawn. Those complaining about climate policy being weighed down by supposedly unrelated demands for child care and free postsecondary education would do well to remember that the caring professions (most of them dominated by women) are relatively low carbon and can be made even more so with smart planning. In other words, they deserve to be seen as “green jobs,” with the same protections, the same investments, and the same living wages as male-dominated workforces in the renewables, efficiency, and public transit sectors. Meanwhile, to make those sectors less male-dominated, family leave and pay equity are a must, which is why both are included in the Green New Deal resolution. We have been trained to see our issues in silos; they never belonged there.

  Drawing out these connections in ways that capture the public imagination will take a massive exercise in participatory democracy. A first step is for workers in every sector (hospitals, schools, universities, tech, manufacturing, media, and more) to make their own plans for how to rapidly decarbonize while furthering the Green New Deal’s mission to eliminate poverty, create good jobs, and close the racial and gender wealth divides. The Green New Deal resolution explicitly calls for this kind of democratic, decentralized leadership, and making it happen would go a long way toward building the broad base of support this framework will need to take on the powerful elite forces that are already lining up against it.

  And there are plenty more connections to be made. A job guarantee, far from an unrelated socialist addendum, is a critical part of achieving a rapid and just transition. It would immediately lower the intense pressure on workers to take the kinds of jobs that destabilize our planet because all would be free to take the time needed to retrain and find work in one of the many sectors that will be dramatically expanding.

  All these so-called bread-and-butter provisions (for job security, health care, child care, education, and housing) are fundamentally about creating a context in which the rampant economic insecurity of our age is addressed at the source. And that has everything to do with our capacity to cope with climate disruption, because the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change. Put another way, this is how we are going to address the crisis of empathy in a warming world.

  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 it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair. Repairing the land. Repairing our stuff. Fearlessly repairing our relationships within our countries and between them.

  We must always remember that the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion. The route to renewal runs through reckoning and repair: reckoning with our past and repairing relationships with the people who paid the steepest price of the first Industrial Revolution.

  These failures to confront difficult truths have long made a mockery of any notion of a collective “we”; only when we reckon with them will our societies be liberated to find our collective purpose. In fact, delivering that sense of common purpose is perhaps the Green New Deal’s greatest promise. Because it isn’t only the planet’s life support systems that are unraveling before our eyes. So too is our social fabric, on so many fronts at once.

  The signs of fracture are all around—from the rise of fake news and unhinged conspiracy theories to the hardened arteries of our body politic. In this context, a Green New Deal, precisely because of its sweeping scale, ambition, and urgency, could be the collective purpose that finally helps overcome many of these divides.

  It’s not a magic cure for racism or misogyny or homophobia or transphobia—we still have to confront those evils head on. But if it became law, despite all the powers arrayed against it, it would give a great many of us a sense of working together toward something bigger than ourselves. Something we are all a part of creating. And it would give us a shared destination—somewhere distinctly better than where we are now. That kind of shared mission is something our late capitalist culture badly needs right now.

  If these kinds of deeper connections between fractured people and a fast-warming planet seem far beyond the scope of policymakers, it’s worth thinking back to the absolutely central role of artists during the New Deal era. Playwrights, photographers, muralists, and novelists were all part of telling the story of what was possible. For the Green New Deal to succeed, we, too, will need the skills and expertise of many different kinds of storytellers: artists, psychologists, faith leaders, historians, and more.

  The Green New Deal framework has a way to go before everyone sees their future in it. Mistakes have already been made, and more will be made along the way. But none of this is as important as what this fast-growing political project gets exactly right.

  The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of pollution and false climate solutions. But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to lose sight of the big picture: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibility to reach for.

  The young organizers in the Sunrise Movement, who have done so much to galvanize the Green New Deal momentum, talk about our collective moment as one filled with both “promise and peril.” That is exactly right. And everything that happens from here on should hold one in each hand.

  THE ART OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

  “We didn’t just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things. We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane.”

  APRIL 2019

  SOMETIMES A PROJECT TAPS INTO a force that is powerful well beyond the expectations of its creators. So it was with A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a seven-minute video I executive-produced and conceived of with the artist Molly Crabapple.

  Narrated by the congresswoman and illustrated by Crabapple, the film is set a couple of decades from now. It begins with Ocasio-Cortez, a white streak in her hair, riding the bullet train from New York to Washington, DC. Rushing past the window is the future created by the successful implementation of a Green New Deal.

  The film project grew out of a conversation I had with Crabapple (a brilliant illustrator, writer, and fi
lmmaker) shortly after the idea for a Green New Deal started gaining traction in the United States. We were brainstorming about how to involve more artists in the project. Most art forms are pretty low carbon, after all, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal led to a renaissance of publicly funded art, with artists of every stripe directly participating in the era’s transformations.

  We wanted to try to galvanize artists into that kind of social mission again, but not years down the road, if the Green New Deal became federal law. No, we wanted to see art right away, to help win the battle for hearts and minds that would determine whether the Green New Deal had a fighting chance in the first place.

  Crabapple suggested doing a film on the Green New Deal with Ocasio-Cortez as the narrator and herself as illustrator. The question was: How do we tell the story of something that hasn’t happened yet?

  As we threw ideas around, we realized that your standard “explainer” video wouldn’t cut it. The biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change that the Green New Deal envisions is not that people fail to understand what is being proposed (though there is certainly plenty of misinformation floating around). It’s that so many are convinced that humanity could never pull off something at this scale and speed. And a whole lot of people have come to believe that dystopia is a foregone conclusion.

  The skepticism is understandable. The idea that societies could collectively decide to embrace rapid foundational changes to transportation, housing, energy, agriculture, forestry, and more—precisely what is needed to avert climate breakdown—is not something for which most of us have any living reference. We have grown up bombarded with the message that there is no alternative to the crappy system that is destabilizing the planet and hoarding vast wealth at the top. From most economists, we hear that we are fundamentally selfish, gratification-seeking units. From historians, we learn that social change has always been the work of singular great men.

  Hollywood hasn’t been much help, either. Almost every vision of the future that we get from big budget sci-fi films takes some kind of ecological and social apocalypse for granted. It’s almost as if we have collectively stopped believing that the future is going to happen, let alone that it could be better, in many ways, than the present.

  Not all art takes collapse for granted, however. There have long been creators on the margins, from Afrofuturists to feminist fantasists, who have attempted to explode the idea that the future has to be like the present, only worse and with sex robots. One such visionary was the great science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who delivered a searing speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, four years before her death. “Hard times are coming,” she said,

  when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. . . . We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.

  The power of art to inspire transformation is one of the original New Deal’s most lasting legacies. And interestingly, back in the 1930s, that transformational project was also under relentless attack in the press, and yet it didn’t slow it down for a minute.

  From the start, elite critics derided FDR’s plans as everything from creeping fascism to closet communism. In the 1933 equivalent of “They’re coming for your hamburgers!” Republican senator Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia wrote to a colleague, “This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot.” A former DuPont executive complained that with the government offering decent-paying jobs, “five negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this spring . . . and a cook on my houseboat in Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.”

  Far-right militias formed; there was even a sloppy plot by a group of bankers to overthrow FDR.

  Self-styled centrists took a more subtle tack: In newspaper editorials and op-eds, they cautioned FDR to slow down and scale back. Historian Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, told me that the parallels with today’s attacks on the Green New Deal in outlets like the New York Times are obvious. “They didn’t outright oppose it, but in many cases, they would argue that you don’t want to make so many changes at once, that it was too big, too quick. That the administration should wait and study more.”

  And yet for all its many contradictions and exclusions, the New Deal’s popularity continued to soar, winning Democrats a bigger majority in Congress in the midterms and FDR a landslide reelection in 1936.

  The main reason that the elite attacks never succeeded in turning the public against the New Deal was that its programs were helping people. But another reason had to do with the incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era’s transformations. The New Dealers saw artists as workers like any other: people who, in the depths of the Depression, deserved direct government assistance to practice their trade. As Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins famously put it, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”

  Through programs that included the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theatre Project, and Federal Writers Project (all part of the WPA), as well as the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and several others, tens of thousands of painters, musicians, photographers, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, authors, and a huge array of craftspeople found meaningful work, with unprecedented support going to African American and Indigenous artists.

  The result was an explosion of creativity and a staggering body of work. The Federal Art Project alone produced nearly 475,000 works of visual art, including more than 2,000 posters, 2,500 murals, and 100,000 canvases for public spaces. Its stable of artists included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Authors who participated in the Federal Writers’ Project included Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and John Steinbeck. The Federal Music Project was responsible for 225,000 performances, reaching some 150 million Americans.

  Much of the art produced by New Deal programs was simply about bringing joy and beauty to Depression-ravaged people—while challenging the prevalent idea that art belonged exclusively to the wealthy. As FDR put it in a 1938 letter to author Hendrik Willem van Loon, “I, too, have a dream—to show people in the out of the way places, some of whom are not only in small villages but in corners of New York City . . . some real paintings and prints and etchings and some real music.”

  Some New Deal art set out to mirror a shattered country back to itself and, in the process, make an unassailable case for why New Deal relief programs were so desperately needed. The result was iconic work, from Dorothea Lange’s photography of Dust Bowl families enveloped in clouds of filth and forced to migrate, to Walker Evans’s harrowing images of tenant farmers that filled the pages of the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to Gordon Parks’s pathbreaking photography of daily life in Harlem.

  Other artists produced more optimistic, even utopian creations, using graphic art, short films, and vast murals to document the transformation under way under New Deal programs—the strong bodies building new infrastructure, planting trees, and otherwise picking up the pieces of their nation.

  Just as Crabapple and I started mulling over the idea of a Green New Deal short film, inspired by the utopian art of the New Deal, The Intercept published a piece by Kate Aronoff that was set in the year 2043, after the Green New Deal had come to pass. It told the story of what life was like for a fictionalized “Gina,” who grew up in the world that Green New Deal policies had created: “She had a relatively stable childhood. Her parents availed themselves of some of the year of paid fami
ly leave they were entitled to, and after that she was dropped off at a free child care program.” After free college, “she spent six months restoring wetlands and another six volunteering at a day care much like the one she had gone to.”

  The piece struck a nerve, in large part because it imagined a future tense that wasn’t some version of Mad Max warriors battling prowling bands of cannibal warlords. Crabapple and I decided that our film could do something similar, but this time from Ocasio-Cortez’s vantage point. It would tell the story of how society decided to go bold rather than give up, and paint a picture of the world after the Green New Deal the congresswoman had championed became reality.

  The final result is a seven-minute postcard from the future, codirected by Crabapple’s longtime collaborators Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt, and cowritten by Ocasio-Cortez and filmmaker and climate justice organizer Avi Lewis (who also happens to be my husband). It’s a story about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving.

  Crabapple’s paintbrushes depict a country both familiar and entirely new. Cities are connected by bullet trains, Indigenous elders help young people restore wetlands, millions find jobs retrofitting low-cost housing—and when superstorms drown major cities, the residents respond not with vigilantism and recrimination but with cooperation and solidarity. Over those lush paintings, Ocasio-Cortez’s voice is heard: