How to Change Everything

by Naomi Klein

  Although the Extinction Rebellion activists didn’t stop the rig from being moved, they did get the chance to tell newspapers and television reporters why they felt it was important to stop drilling for oil around Scotland.

  While big demonstrations or stunts do draw attention, they aren’t the only way to get the message across. A majority of young activists focus on other equally determined acts, such as writing letters to lawmakers and political candidates, marching in school strikes, and researching and sharing climate information with their peers and families. These actions also raise awareness about climate change and inspire people to take action. A 2019 study found that when parents are skeptical about the seriousness of climate change, some of the people most likely to change their minds are their own children. Activism does not have to be dramatic to be meaningful.

  A NEW RISING

  Think again of that turning-point year of 1988, when the US Congress heard a statement about human-caused climate change. Imagine that the nations of the world had come together then and taken real action to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

  The climate crisis today would be less severe. We would be much further along in the work of preventing catastrophe. Now imagine that those steps had been taken even earlier, in 1977, when a scientist at Exxon had first talked to his bosses about the problem of fossil fuels and greenhouse gases.

  Because of the powerful influence of pro-business ideas, we lost whole decades that could have been spent lowering emissions. We could have made the worst future effects of climate change far less likely.

  We can’t change that now. That’s the bad news—and you have a right to be angry about it.

  The good news is that there is still a great deal we can do about climate change today.

  The problem in 1988 wasn’t “human nature,” something that we can’t change. As we have seen, the problem was companies and governmental policies that valued markets and profits over people and the planet. And that is something we can question, challenge, and change.

  A young and growing movement is rising in the United States and many other countries. Young people are doing more than saying no to the polluters and politicians of the present. They are not accepting greenwashing or propaganda or denials. Instead, they are mapping out and fighting for a better future. And while earlier generations of activists focused on the symptoms of environmental and climate problems, your generation is taking aim at the very system that values profits over lives and our climate future.

  The message of the school strikes and other youth movements is that a great many young people are ready for that kind of deep change. They are calling for a new politics and a new economics with new values, with decisions based on justice and on the world’s carbon budget. “But that is not enough,” says Greta Thunberg. “We need a whole new way of thinking…. We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources.”

  Today is different from 1988, and not just because we are decades further into the climate crisis. It’s different because of your generation’s fierce insistence on deep change. The youth climate movement and other youth-led movements fighting racial and gender violence and discrimination are mighty forces pushing us all toward a better future.

  CHAPTER 6 Protecting Their Homes—and the Planet

  A scientist with pink hair and a serious expression had come to San Francisco to give a talk.

  His name was Brad Werner. He was a researcher at the University of California at San Diego. It was December 2012, and twenty-four thousand scientists had gathered for a meeting. The schedule was packed with talks, but Werner’s had drawn a lot of attention because of its topic. He was going to talk about the fate of the planet.

  Standing at the front of the conference room, Werner took the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to predict this. A lot of the details would be mystifying to those who are new to Werner’s subject of research, which is complex systems theory. (Systems theory is the study of complicated systems with many parts that interact with each other. One example of a complex system is weather, which is the interplay of parts such as temperature, air currents, ocean currents, geography, and more.)

  The bottom line of Werner’s presentation, though, was clear. A global economy based on fossil-fuel energy, free-market economics, and consumerism has made it easy to use up the Earth’s resources—so easy that the balance between Earth’s resources and ecosystems on one hand and human consumption on the other is becoming unstable.

  But one piece of Werner’s complex model offered hope. He called it “resistance.” By this he meant movements of people or groups whose actions do not fit within the mainstream economic culture. Those actions could include environmental protests, blockades, and mass uprisings by Indigenous Peoples, workers, and others. The most likely way to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control is a resistance movement. It would add “friction,” as Werner said—grit in the gears of the machine.

  Werner pointed out that past social movements have changed the direction of mainstream culture. The abolitionist movement ended slavery. The civil rights movement won equality under the law for Black Americans. By proving to national leaders that many people not only supported but demanded change, these movements led to the passage of new laws that made the change happen. Werner said, “If we’re thinking about the future of the Earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics.”

  In other words, only social movements can turn the tide of climate change now.

  With the climate crisis becoming ever more urgent, those movements are gathering speed. Young people are not simply joining them. Often they are leading the way.

  This chapter takes a close look at several recent acts of resistance to climate change and injustice. Each of these acts involved young people who wanted to protect their homes—and help save the planet while doing so. Each of them was a piece of grit in the gears, a challenge to the economic ideas and the fossil-fuel-based industries that have contributed so much to our current crisis. These activists stood up, spoke out, and tested the power of resistance. They mapped out some of the paths that can lead us to a better climate future.

  THE HEILTSUK NATION: THE RIGHT TO SAY NO

  Bella Bella, also known as Waglisla, is a state-sanctioned reserve for the Heiltsuk Nation, one of the many Nations located on the coast of British Columbia. It is a remote island community, a place of deep fjords and lush evergreen forests reaching to the sea. In 2012 it had 1,905 residents. On an April day, about a third of them were out in Bella Bella’s streets. That was the day a three-person review panel flew into town to hold a hearing about an oil pipeline.

  The remote Canadian island town of Bella Bella draws life from the waters around it. When those waters were threatened, the community fought for them.

  The pipeline was being planned by Enbridge, a Canadian company that builds pipelines and storage centers for oil. The planned pipeline was called the Northern Gateway. It would run through the western part of Canada for 731 miles (1,176 kilometers) from Edmonton, in the neighboring province of Alberta, to the coast of British Columbia. On the coast, oil extracted from tar sands in Alberta would be gathered and loaded onto ocean-going tankers and shipped around the world. The pipeline would carry 525,000 barrels of oil a day.

  The review panel that had just arrived would tell the Canadian government whether the plan should go ahead or not. For months the panel had been holding hearings along the route that the pipeline and tankers would follow. Now its members had reached the end of the line.

  Bella Bella is 124 miles (200 kilometers) south of the point where the Northern Gateway would meet the sea. But the Pacific waters that are the town’s front yard were in the path that those tankers would take. Those waters are sprinkled with islands and rocky reefs. The waters swirl with changing currents. And the tankers would be huge. They could carry 75 percent more crude o
il than the Exxon Valdez, a tanker that caused a widespread and long-lasting environmental disaster when it spilled oil in Alaskan waters in 1989.

  The Heiltsuk Peoples living in Bella Bella had deep concerns about the potential for a spill in their waters. And they were ready to share those concerns with the review board.

  A line of Heiltsuk chiefs, wearing traditional embroidered robes and headdresses and hats of woven cedar, welcomed the review board at the airport with a dance. Drummers and singers backed them up. A large crowd of demonstrators waited behind a chain-link fence, holding canoe paddles and anti-pipeline signs.

  Behind the chiefs stood a twenty-five-year-old woman named Jess Housty. She had helped energize the community to meet with the review panel. For Housty, the scene at the airport was the result of “a huge planning effort driven by our whole community.” But young people had taken the lead, turning their school into a hub of organizing. They’d researched the history of oil spills from pipelines and tankers. They’d painted signs. They’d written essays about how an oil spill in their waters would damage not only the ecosystem but also their way of life. Both the ancient culture of the Heiltsuk Peoples and their modern livelihoods are tied to the ecosystem, especially to its herring and sockeye salmon. Teachers said that no issue had ever engaged the community’s young people as much as the pipeline proposal.

  “As a community,” Housty later said, “we were prepared to stand up with dignity and integrity to be witnesses for the lands and waters that sustained our ancestors—that sustain us—that we believe should sustain our future generations.”

  Indigenous activists were a major part of efforts to block Canada’s Northern Gateway pipeline, as in this 2012 protest in Victoria, British Columbia.

  The high level of community involvement made what happened next all the more crushing. The review panel refused the invitation to the feast that had been planned for the evening. It also canceled the pipeline hearing for which the community had been preparing for months.

  Why?

  The visitors said they felt unsafe after their five-minute drive from the airport into town. They had passed hundreds of people, including children, holding signs: OIL IS DEATH, WE HAVE A MORAL RIGHT TO SAY NO, KEEP OUR OCEANS BLUE, and I CAN’T DRINK OIL. One protester thought the panel members weren’t bothering to look out the window, so he slapped the side of their van as it drove by. Did the panel members mistake his slap for a gunshot, as some people later said? Police who had been there, though, said that the protest was not violent. There had been no threat to anyone’s safety.

  Many of the Heiltsuk citizens were shocked by the way the spirit of their protest had been misunderstood. They felt that when the panel members had looked out the van windows, they’d seen nothing but a mob of “angry Indians” who wanted to vent hatred at anyone linked to the pipeline. Their demonstration, though, had been mainly about love—their love for their home, and its entire web of life, in a breathtakingly beautiful part of the world.

  In the end, the hearing was held after all, but the community had lost a day and a half of its scheduled time. Many people had no chance to be heard in person.

  Still, Jess Housty—who was elected to the Heiltsuk Tribal Council as its youngest member—traveled for a full day to another town to speak before the review panel. Her message was clear:

  When my children are born, I want them to be born into a world where hope and transformation are possible. I want them to be born into a world where stories still have power. I want them to grow up able to be Heiltsuk in every sense of the word. To practice the customs and understand the identity that has made our people strong for hundreds of generations.

  This cannot happen if we do not sustain the integrity of our territory, the lands and waters, and the stewardship practices that link our people to the landscape. On behalf of the young people in my community, I respectfully disagree with the notion that there is any compensation to be made for the loss of our identity, for the loss of our right to be Heiltsuk.

  More than a thousand people spoke to the review panel at its hearings in British Columbia. Only two of them supported the pipeline. One poll showed that eight out of ten people in British Columbia did not want more oil tankers along their coastline.

  So what did the review panel recommend to Canada’s federal government? That the pipeline should go ahead. Many Canadians saw this as a clear sign that the decision was about money and power, not about the environment or the will of the people.

  The government approved the pipeline in 2014. However, Enbridge, the company that wanted to build the Northern Gateway, would have to meet 209 conditions, such as creating plans for safeguarding caribou habitat and consulting with members of the Heiltsuk Nation and other Indigenous Peoples who would be affected by the pipeline.

  A bigger obstacle for the company, though, was that a large part of the public did not stop protesting the pipeline. Indigenous Peoples from many groups united against Northern Gateway, still fearing that spills would damage land, wildlife, and the Fraser River, as well as coastal waters. Their concerns were reasonable. The Canada Energy Regulator, the government agency responsible for monitoring the pipelines that carry oil or liquefied natural gas in Canada, recorded between 54 and 175 leaks, spills, or fires each year from 2008 to 2019.

  Environmental organizations, Indigenous Peoples, and groups of citizens took their protest to court and sued to stop the building of the pipeline. The cases went to trial in British Columbia and in the federal justice system of Canada. In 2016 the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the government’s approval of the pipeline. It said that Enbridge had not properly consulted with Indigenous Peoples over the project.

  The fight of the Standing Rock Sioux of North Dakota to protect their water drew supporters from around the world, including Indigenous protesters in Toronto, Canada.

  Finally, after this victory, the company stopped fighting for the pipeline. In 2019 it said that it had no plans to reopen the Northern Gateway project. Instead, it would focus on smaller pipelines.

  Every pipeline is a risk, as Enbridge knows. In 2010 a massive spill from one of its pipelines contaminated forty miles (sixty-four kilometers) of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan with heavy oil from the tar sands. Cleanup took years and cost more than a billion dollars. Enbridge settled claims against it for $177 million, including fines.

  But for the Heiltsuk Nation, at least, the threat of a new pipeline is in the past. People there won a victory when they claimed their right to say no.

  STANDING ROCK: THE WATER PROTECTORS

  Like the story of the Northern Gateway, the story of Standing Rock is about a pipeline and a protest.

  Although the protest eventually grew to include environmentalists, military veterans, celebrities, and people from around the world, it began with Indigenous People. At its heart was a desperate attempt by the Standing Rock Sioux of North Dakota to protect their land—and especially their water.

  A Texas company called Energy Transfer wanted to build the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) to connect oil fields in North Dakota to an oil storage center in Illinois. The 1,172-mile (1,886-kilometer) pipeline would be buried in the ground. It would be drilled beneath hundreds of lakes or waterways, including the Missouri, Mississippi, and Illinois Rivers. At thirty inches (seventy-six centimeters) wide, the DAPL could move up to 570,000 barrels of oil each day.

  The risks of pipelines are well known. Leaks caused by rust or other damage spill oil or liquefied natural gas into soil or water, where they are dangerous or toxic to humans and wildlife. Such contamination can linger for years. And because these substances are flammable, fires can occur at the site of a leak or fault in the pipeline. The US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which monitors pipelines in the United States, recorded 12,312 incidents from 2000 to 2019. These incidents led to 308 deaths, 1,222 injuries, and $9.5 billion in damages.

  In spite of these risks, Energy Transfer claimed that
the Dakota Access Pipeline would be safe. They said building it would create thousands of short-term jobs and up to fifty permanent jobs in North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, the states along the pipeline’s path.

  At first, the pipeline was going to pass near Bismarck, North Dakota, but the US Army Corps of Engineers turned down that plan because it feared that leaks from the pipeline could contaminate the city’s water supply. A new plan would run the pipeline along the northern tip of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which straddles the border between the two Dakotas.

  Instead of threatening a city with a majority white population, now the DAPL would threaten Lake Oahe, the only source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux. Their sacred and cultural sites would also be at risk. This was environmental racism, out in the open.

  People protested the pipeline at many points along its route, but the long and determined protest at Standing Rock captured the attention of the world. While teams of lawyers and environmentalists tried to block or delay the pipeline on legal grounds, in April 2016 young people of Standing Rock started the #NoDAPL protest campaign against the pipeline. They called for the world to join them in blocking construction of the pipeline.

  LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, the tribe’s official historian, opened the first camp for this resistance movement on her land. It was called Sacred Stone Camp. The movement’s slogan, in the Lakota language, was Mni wiconi—“Water Is Life.” The protesters described themselves as water protectors.