How to Change Everything

by Naomi Klein

  But the signs of such effects appeared long ago. The earliest victims of coal were the miners who helped bring it out of the earth. Many died from a disease called black lung, which is as awful as it sounds. It is caused by exposure to coal dust, which damages lung tissue. Other early victims were the workers who toiled in the new factories and mills before there were laws in place to limit working hours, prevent child labor, or make workplaces safe. And of course the enslaved people who harvested the cotton, rubber, rice, and sugar cane that fed many of those factories were the greatest casualties of all. The environment, too, showed the scars of industrial progress. People grew used to seeing heaps of mining waste, soot-filled air, and polluted waterways instead of the natural scenery that had once surrounded them.

  All of these things should have been early warnings that we were releasing poisons into the world, and the warning signs would increase in the twentieth century. However, most people didn’t start to pay meaningful attention to what we were putting at risk until after the threat from climate change began to be understood. In the next chapter you’ll see how scientists, writers, and people from many different age groups finally joined together in the late twentieth century to challenge the vending-machine view of nature—and to call for changes that would improve the health of both people and the planet.

  CHAPTER 5 The Battle Takes Shape

  Fossil fuels built the modern world. We all live inside the story written by coal, oil, and extractivism. Even in countries that do not have a lot of heavy industry, the air we breathe and the weather around us are affected by the global industrial economy. The phones, cars, and other goods we buy are products of that fossil-fuel-driven economy.

  Within the story of fossil fuels and extractivism, people have fought for a more equal sharing of the profits. They have won some victories for the poor and the working classes, although most of these struggles did not confront the basic idea of extractivism itself. But by the 1980s, as concern about our dependence on fossil fuels grew, people began to challenge that very idea.

  A fateful clash took shape. On one side were those who listened to the emerging warnings about fossil fuels and added new concerns about climate change. On the other side were those who ignored the warnings, shouted more loudly to drown the warnings out, or twisted the data to obscure the truth. This clash of values and ideas could not have come at a worse time in our history.

  RISE OF A MOVEMENT

  The movement often referred to as “environmentalism” is a network of many groups that want to protect the world and its resources from being devoured by human activity. Environmentalism’s ideas are not new, but as a media phenomenon the movement came to maturity in the twentieth century. Did this new movement challenge the extractivists’ view of nature as a bottomless source of resources and wealth? Not exactly.

  Environmentalism’s early history, especially in North America, had little to do with ordinary working-class people, much less the poor. It started out as a movement called conservationism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Conservationism was mostly made up of privileged, well-off men who enjoyed fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking. Although they realized that the rapid spread of industry threatened the wilderness they loved, most of them did not ask whether that spread across America’s landscapes was a good thing, or whether it should be controlled. They just wanted to make sure that some spectacular places were set aside for them to enjoy. Their movement was not concerned with the fact that other places would be damaged by industry and development.

  Noisy public protests were not how early conservationists achieved their goal. That would have been unseemly for a movement tied to the upper classes. No, they quietly persuaded other men like them to save a place they loved by turning it into a national or state park, or a private family nature park, or a game preserve. And often this meant that Indigenous People lost their right to hunt and fish on those grounds. There is a cruel irony to this because, as we have seen, Indigenous People living in what is now called North America were the continent’s original environmentalists.

  There were some early American ecological thinkers who argued for more than protecting isolated pieces of the landscape. Some of them were influenced by Asian beliefs that all life is interconnected, or by Native American belief systems that see all living creatures as our relatives. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau of New England wrote, “The Earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic….” This was the exact opposite of Francis Bacon’s image of the Earth as an unliving machine whose mysteries could be mastered and plundered by the human mind.

  Ideas similar to Thoreau’s were held almost a century later by another American, Aldo Leopold, who was a key part of a second wave of environmentalism. His book A Sand County Almanac called for looking at the natural world in a way that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals.” This would change the role of humans from “conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

  Leopold’s writings had a huge influence on ecological thought, but, like Thoreau’s earlier ideas, they did not slow down the galloping progress of industrialization. They were not tied to a large movement with support from much of the population. The dominant worldview continued to see humans as a conquering army, bringing the natural world under its control.

  An important new challenge to this view appeared in 1962. That was when Rachel Carson, a scientist and writer, published Silent Spring. The book detailed the widespread use of chemicals such as DDT to kill insects. It showed the damage these insecticides did to bird life and more.

  DDT being sprayed to control mosquitoes in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. This toxic pesticide was banned in the US in 1972, ten years after Rachel Carson wrote about its devastating effects on wildlife in Silent Spring.

  Carson’s book boiled over with anger toward the chemical industry that used planes to spray from the air to wipe out insects, thoughtlessly endangering animal and human life in the process. Her focus was DDT, yet she knew that the problem was not one particular chemical. It was a way of thinking based on “control of nature.” Her writing inspired a new generation of environmentalists to see themselves as part of a fragile planetary ecosystem, a web of interconnected life that we could not control without it collapsing.

  Partly due to the wide influence of Silent Spring, around this time more people began questioning our treatment of the natural world and also the basic idea of extractivism—that there would always be more for us to take from nature. In North America, a new kind of environmental organization burst into life. Unlike the gentlemanly conservationists of the past, these activists did fight their battles in public and in the courts.

  THE GOLDEN AGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

  One of the new groups that came into being in the years after Silent Spring was the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). A group of scrappy scientists and lawyers founded the organization in 1967. They heard Rachel Carson’s warning and took action. The EDF filed the original lawsuit that led to the United States banning DDT as an insecticide. After the ban, many species of birds recovered. One of them was the bald eagle, the country’s national bird.

  When politicians of both parties were shown clear evidence of a serious problem that affected everyone, they asked themselves, “What can we do to stop it?” A wave of environmental victories followed.

  The first environmental act to become federal law in the United States was the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. It was followed by the Clean Air Act of 1963. Then came the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Air Quality Act of 1967, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968. These pieces of legislation were landmarks because they established the principle that the government had both the right and the responsibility to regulate how the entire country interacted with the environment. These victories seem almost impossible today, now that
corporations and many more politicians are lined up against any kind of government regulation or control.

  Environmental laws also reflect the fact that the environmental movement had diverse goals. Laws to limit the kinds and amounts of wastes and emissions that could go into air and water, for example, were largely aimed at protecting human health. The wilderness and rivers acts, in contrast, were aimed at preserving parts of the natural world. Twenty-three such diverse federal environmental acts were passed during the 1970s.

  Then, in 1980, the Superfund Act required industry to make a small contribution toward cleaning up industrial areas that were dangerously full of toxic pollutants—the broad range of chemicals that can poison soil, water, air, and living things. The Superfund Act established the “polluter pays” principle that is central to climate justice.

  These victories spilled over into Canada, which had its own flurry of environmental activism. And across the Atlantic Ocean, the European Community declared environmental protection a top priority in 1972. In the decades that followed, Europe became a leader in environmental law. The 1970s also brought landmarks in international environmental law, including an agreement to ban the commercial trade in endangered species, such as rare birds, or products made from endangered species, such as rhinoceros horn.

  Environmental law did not take hold in many poorer parts of the world for another decade or so. In the meantime, communities defended the natural world directly. Women in Africa and India led creative campaigns against the loss of forests. Citizens of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico organized large-scale resistance to nuclear power plants, dams, and other industrial developments. The process of developing stronger environmental laws in these countries followed.

  This golden age of environmental law was based on two simple ideas. First, ban, or severely limit, the material or activity that creates the problem. Second, where possible, make the polluters pay for cleaning up their messes. Because large parts of the public supported these actions, the environmental movement won its greatest string of victories. But success brought major changes to the movement.

  For many groups, the work of environmentalism changed. With the passage of laws that allowed polluters to be sued, environmentalists shifted their focus to legal actions rather than organizing protests and teach-ins. What had once been dismissed by some as a rabble of hippies became a movement of lawyers and lobbyists who spent their time meeting with politicians, jetting from one United Nations summit to the next, and striking deals with businesses. Many environmentalists prided themselves on being insiders who could wheel and deal with political leaders and the heads of corporations.

  In the 1980s, this insider culture caused a shift. Some groups, including the EDF, took a new position toward business and corporations. In their view, the “new environmentalism” should not work to ban harmful activities. Instead, it would form partnerships with polluters. Environmentalists could then persuade corporations to change their ways through voluntary measures. They would convince the polluters that they could save money and develop new products by going green—that is, by making their businesses more environmentally friendly.

  This approach mirrored the pro-business thinking of the US government under Ronald Reagan, who was president from 1981 to 1989. It held that private solutions driven by the moneymaking motive and by the forces of the market are better than rules set out by the government.

  The mainstream environmental movement had become Big Green. It now worked on different principles than the environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s. The new principles were:

  Don’t try to outlaw toxic or environmentally destructive things.

  Don’t make enemies of business leaders and the politicians they support.

  Fight smaller battles. Maybe convince a polluter to do a few good things along with the bad things, or switch to a slightly less bad thing. Then you can call it a win for both sides.

  Still, not every environmental group became business-friendly. Smaller, grassroots groups as well as a few of the large ones kept their focus on direct action against environmental harm. They continued to organize protests and file lawsuits. They encouraged consumers to boycott—or stop buying—products made by polluting companies.

  Luckily, by this time the public in general was more familiar with environmentalism than it had been a generation earlier. Starting in 1970, the United States and many other nations had celebrated Earth Day every April as “a day for the environment.” Schoolchildren grew up working on Earth Day projects—collecting litter from parks, for instance, or learning about wetlands. The words “environment” and “ecology” appeared in more and more conversations, classrooms, and news articles. Movements to “Save the Whales,” or the pandas, or the rain forest seemed to pop up every week.

  So when the words “global warming” and “climate change” showed up in conversations and news articles in the late 1980s, a lot of people were already used to thinking about environmental problems. But they had faced nothing on the scale of the looming climate crisis, when the environmental movement’s drift toward business-oriented solutions would fall drastically short.

  Young Environmentalists

  for the Twenty-First Century

  Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson inspired environmentalists through the best-selling books they wrote. Some of today’s young activists have already written books, but they also rely on marches, clubs, social media, and the internet to spread their messages and inspire people.

  By the time he was seventeen, Jackson Hinkle of San Clemente, California, was taking action against plastic waste. He was a surfer, so he knew about the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. As he learned more about water and the harms being done to it, he discovered that companies that sell bottled water are draining the local water sources of people around the world. He also learned that some plastic bottles can be a health risk as well as a waste problem.

  Hinkle organized a march in his California county against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatened the water source of the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota. (You will see more of the story of Standing Rock and the pipeline protests in the next chapter.) Hinkle also founded a club to campaign against plastic waste and to encourage people to use sustainable, reusable stainless steel water bottles.

  Celeste Tinajero of Reno, Nevada, also joined an environmental club. She became part of Eco Warriors in high school after her older brother suggested it. The two of them then won first place in a competition sponsored by GREENevada. They used the $12,000 grant to make their high school more environmentally sustainable by updating its bathrooms, which wasted water with outdated sinks and toilets and also used wasteful paper towels. The following year they won second place in the same competition. This time they used the grant money to promote reusable water bottles for students. Tinajero went on to work for a local nonprofit group, designing education programs about living sustainably and cutting waste.

  Writing a book about the natural world—together with the rest of her third-grade class—led Delaney Anne Reynolds of Miami, Florida, into environmental work at an early age. In middle school she helped build a solar power system for her school. Family trips to the ocean sparked her interest in the sea. She began researching marine biology, and this led her to an interest in the warming climate and its effects on the ocean—including rising seas.

  Reynolds has since met with politicians, local business owners, and climate scientists to gain information and talk about solutions. By the age of seventeen she had written several other children’s books about the environment. She had also delivered a TEDxYouth talk, which can be seen online, and had founded the Sink or Swim Project, which calls for education and political action to prevent Miami from sinking under the waters of climate change.

  “I need your help,” Reynolds says to other young people in her talk. “I need you to become involved, to speak up and out, because the time has come for our generation to solve this problem, to change old habits by getting rid of f
ossil fuels, to set politics aside, to invent new technologies. The time has come for our generation to decide whether we want our planet to sink, or swim.”

  These young climate activists, and many more like them, have shared their messages in a variety of ways, from marches and contest entries to books and websites. Their achievements show that what starts as a school project or a recreational hobby can turn into a crusade—or even a career—that can have as much impact as the activists that came before them.

  IT WASN’T HUMAN NATURE

  Time magazine did not name a Person of the Year in 1988. The honor went to the “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth.” The cover of the magazine showed a globe that was held together with string. In the background, the sun set in a blood-red sky.

  “No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home” was the explanation for Time’s choice.

  Thirty years later, a journalist named Nathaniel Rich looked back on that moment in an article about the climate crisis for the New York Times. Back in 1988, the world seemed to truly understand that our pollution was dangerously overheating the planet. And governments were heading toward a tough, science-based global agreement to lower greenhouse gas emissions and head off the worst effects of climate change. The basic science of climate change had come to be understood and accepted during the 1980s.

  The year 1988 was a watershed. That was when the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, spoke before the US Congress. Hansen said that he had “99 percent confidence” in “a real warming trend” that was linked to human activity. The statement was reported around the world. Now everyone knew that humans were causing the planet to get warmer.