This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  In some cases, the effect of the astronaut’s eye view proves particularly extreme. Their minds hovering out in orbit, there are those who begin to imagine leaving the planet for good—saying, “Goodbye Earth!” to quote Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, who, in the mid-1970s, started calling for the creation of space colonies to overcome the earth’s resource limits. Interestingly, one of O’Neill’s most devoted disciples was Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, who spent a good chunk of the 1970s arguing that the U.S. government should build space colonies; today he is one of the most vocal proponents of Big Tech fixes to climate change, whether nuclear power or geoengineering.59

  And he’s not the only prominent geoengineering booster nurturing the ultimate escape fantasy. Lowell Wood, co-inventor of the hose-to-the-sky, is an evangelical proponent of terraforming Mars: there is “a 50/50 chance that young children now alive will walk on Martian meadows . . . will swim in Martian lakes,” he told an Aspen audience in 2007, describing the technological expertise for making this happen as “kid’s stuff.”60

  And then there is Richard Branson, Mr. Retail Space himself. In September 2012, Branson told CBS This Morning that, “In my lifetime, I am determined to be part of starting a population on Mars. I think it is absolutely realistic. It will happen.” This plan, he said, includes “people inhabiting Mars . . . in sort of giant domes.” In another interview, he revealed that he has put a striking amount of thought into who should be invited to this outer space cocktail party: “You’re going to want physicians, you’re going to want comedians, you’re going to want fun people, beautiful people, ugly people, a good cross-section of what happens on Earth on Mars. People have got to be able to get on together, because it’s going to be quite confined.” Oh and one more person on the list: “It may be a one-way trip. . . . So maybe I’ll wait till the last 10 years of my life, and then maybe go, if my wife will let me,” Branson said. In explaining his rationale, the Virgin head has invoked physicist Stephen Hawking, who “thinks it’s absolutely essential for mankind to colonize other planets because one day, something dreadful might happen to the Earth. And it would be very sad to see years of evolution going to waste.”61

  So said the man whose airlines have a carbon footprint the size of Honduras’ and who is pinning his hopes for planetary salvation not on emissions cuts, but on a carbon-sucking machine that hasn’t been invented yet.62 Perhaps this is mere coincidence, but it does seem noteworthy that so many key figures in the geoengineering scene share a strong interest in a planetary exodus. For it is surely a lot easier to accept the prospect of a recklessly high-risk Plan B when you have, in your other back pocket, a Plan C.

  The danger is not so much that these visions will be realized; geoengineering the earth is a long shot, never mind terraforming Mars. Yet as Branson’s own emissions illustrate so elegantly, these fantasies are already doing real damage in the here and now. As environmental author Kenneth Brower writes, “The notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.” And worst of all, it tells us that, “should the fix fail, we have someplace else to go.”63

  We know this escape story all too well, from Noah’s Ark to the Rapture. What we need are stories that tell us something very different: that this planet is our only home, and that what goes around comes around (and what goes up, stays up for a very long time, so we’d better be careful what we put there).

  Indeed, if geoengineering has anything going for it, it is that it slots perfectly into our most hackneyed cultural narrative, the one in which so many of us have been indoctrinated by organized religion and the rest of us have absorbed from pretty much every Hollywood action movie ever made. It’s the one that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us (the ones that matter) are going to be saved. And since our secular religion is technology, it won’t be god that saves us but Bill Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures. We hear versions of this narrative every time a commercial comes on about how coal is on the verge of becoming “clean,” about how the carbon produced by the tar sands will soon be sucked out of the air and buried deep underground, and now, about how the mighty sun will be turned down as if it were nothing more than a chandelier on a dimmer. And if one of the current batch of schemes doesn’t work, the same story tells us that something else will surely arrive in the nick of time. We are, after all, the super-species, the chosen ones, the God Species. We will triumph in the end because triumphing is what we do.

  But after so many of our most complex systems have failed, from BP’s deepwater drilling to the derivatives market—with some of our biggest brains failing to foresee these outcomes—there is some evidence that the power of this particular narrative arc is beginning to weaken. The Brookings Institution released a survey in 2012 that found that roughly seven in ten Americans think that trying to turn down the sun will do more harm than good. Only three in ten believe that “scientists would be able to find ways to alter the climate in a way that limits problems” caused by warming. And in a paper published in Nature Climate Change in early 2014, researchers analyzed data from interviews and a large online survey conducted in Australia and New Zealand—with the biggest sample size of any geoengineering public opinion study to date. Malcolm Wright, the study’s lead author, explained, “The results show that the public has strong negative views towards climate engineering. . . . It is a striking result and a very clear pattern. Interventions such as putting mirrors in space or fine particles into the stratosphere are not well received.” Perhaps most interesting of all given the high-tech subject, older respondents were more amenable to geoengineering than younger ones.64

  And the best news is that the time of astronaut’s eye-view environmentalism appears to be passing, with a new movement rising to take its place, one deeply rooted in specific geographies but networked globally as never before. Having witnessed the recent spate of big failures, this generation of activists is unwilling to gamble with the precious and irreplaceable, certainly not based on the reassuring words of overconfident engineers.

  This is a movement of many movements, and though utterly undetectable from space, it is beginning to shake the fossil fuel industry to its core.

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  I. The retreat took place under the Chatham House Rule, which allows those attending to report on what was said in sessions, but not on who said what. (Any interviews conducted outside of the official sessions are exempt from these rules.)

  II. It’s particularly troubling that within the small group of scientists, engineers, and inventors who dominate the geoengineering debate, there have been a disproportionate share of big public errors in the past. Take, for instance, Lowell Wood, co-creator of Myhrvold’s StratoShield. Before becoming a prominent proponent of the “Pinatubo Option,” Wood was best known for coming up with some of the more fantastical elements of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program, widely discredited as expensive and reckless.

  III. That said, we would be wise to anticipate even small amounts of geoengineering unleashing a new age of weather-related geopolitical recrimination, paranoia, and possibly retaliation, with every future natural disaster being blamed—rightly or wrongly—on the people in faraway labs playing god.

  IV. Ironically, the most reproduced of the earth-from-space photos was likely taken by Harrison Schmitt, a card-carrying climate change denier, former U.S. senator and a regular speaker at Heartland conferences. He was rather blasé about the experience: “You seen one Earth, you’ve seen them all,” he reportedly said.

  PART THREE

  STARTING ANYWAY

  “The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its
quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless, is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

  “The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.”

  —Arundhati Roy, 20101

  “When I started the lawsuit against Chevron in 1993, I thought, ‘What we need to do to fight this company and to get justice is we need to unite the Amazon.’ And that was a hard challenge. That was a hard task ahead. And now, today, I dare to say that we must unite the entire world. We have to unite the entire world to fight these companies, to fight these challenges.”

  —Luis Yanza, cofounder, Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front), 20102

  9

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  BLOCKADIA

  The New Climate Warriors

  “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

  —The United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 19921

  “An honest and scrupulous man in the oil business is so rare as to rank as a museum piece.”

  —U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, 19362

  “Passport,” says the cop, tear gas canisters and grenades hanging off his bulletproof vest like medals of honor. We hand over the passports, along with press passes and other papers attesting that we are nothing more exciting than a vanload of Canadian documentary filmmakers.

  The riot cop takes the documents wordlessly, motioning to our translator to get out of the car. He then whispers at length to a colleague whose eyes remain fixed on the enormous biceps bulging from his own crossed arms. Another cop joins the huddle, then another. The last one pulls out a phone and painstakingly reads the names and numbers on each document to whoever is on the other end, occasionally shooting a question to our translator. More uniformed men mill nearby. I count eleven in total.

  It’s getting dark, the dirt road on which we have been apprehended is a mess and drops off sharply on one side. There are no streetlights.

  I have the strong impression we are being deliberately screwed with—that the whole point of this lengthy document check is to force us to drive this rough road in the dark. But we all know the rules: look pleasant; don’t make eye contact; don’t speak unless spoken to. Resist the impulse to take pictures of the line of heavily armed cops standing in front of coils of barbed wire (happily it turns out our camera guy was filming through his mesh hat). And Rule No. 1 on encounters with arbitrary power: do not show how incredibly pissed off you are.

  We wait. Half an hour. Forty minutes. Longer. The sun sets. Our van fills with ravenous mosquitoes. We continue to smile pleasantly.

  As far as checkpoints go, I’ve seen worse. In post-invasion Iraq, everyone had to submit to full pat-downs in order to get in and out of any vaguely official building. Once on the way in and out of Gaza, we were scanned eight different ways and interrogated at length by both the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas. What’s strange about what is happening on this dirt road is that we are not in a war zone, at least not officially. Nor is this a military regime, or an occupied territory, or any other place you might expect to be held and interrogated at length without cause. This is a public road in Greece, a democratic state belonging to the European Union. Moreover this particular road is in Halkidiki, a world-renowned tourist destination that attracts many thousands of visitors every year, drawn to the peninsula’s stunning combination of sandy beaches, turquoise waters, olive groves, and old-growth forests filled with four-hundred-year-old beech and oak trees and dotted with waterfalls.

  So what’s up with all the riot police? The barbed wire? The surveillance cameras strapped to tree branches?

  Welcome to Blockadia

  What’s up is that this area is no longer a Greek vacationland, though the tourists still crowd the white-washed resorts and oceanfront tavernas, with their blue-checked tablecloths and floors sticky with ouzo. This is an outpost of a territory some have taken to calling “Blockadia.” Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines.

  What unites these increasingly interconnected pockets of resistance is the sheer ambition of the mining and fossil fuel companies: the fact that in their quest for high-priced commodities and higher-risk “unconventional” fuels, they are pushing relentlessly into countless new territories, regardless of the impact on the local ecology (in particular, local water systems), as well as the fact that many of the industrial activities in question have neither been adequately tested nor regulated, yet have already shown themselves to be extraordinarily accident-prone.

  What unites Blockadia too is the fact the people at the forefront—packing local council meetings, marching in capital cities, being hauled off in police vans, even putting their bodies between the earth-movers and earth—do not look much like your typical activist, nor do the people in one Blockadia site resemble those in another. Rather, they each look like the places where they live, and they look like everyone: the local shop owners, the university professors, the high school students, the grandmothers. (In the quaint seaside Greek village of Ierissos, with its red roofs and lively beach promenade, when an anti-mining rally is called, the owners of the tavernas have to wait tables themselves because their entire staffs are off at the demos.)

  Resistance to high-risk extreme extraction is building a global, grassroots, and broad-based network the likes of which the environmental movement has rarely seen. And perhaps this phenomenon shouldn’t even be referred to as an environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival—the health of the water, air, and soil. In the process, these place-based stands are stopping real climate crimes in progress.

  Seeing those successes, as well as the failures of top-down environmentalism, many young people concerned about climate change are taking a pass on the slick green groups and the big U.N. summits. Instead, they are flocking to the barricades of Blockadia. This is more than a change in strategy; it’s a fundamental change in perspective. The collective response to the climate crisis is changing from something that primarily takes place in closed-door policy and lobbying meetings into something alive and unpredictable and very much in the streets (and mountains, and farmers’ fields, and forests).

  Unlike so many of their predecessors, who’ve spent years imagining the climate crisis through the astronaut’s eye view, these activists have dropped the model globes and are getting lower-case earth under their nails once again. As Scott Parkin, a climate organizer with the Rainforest Action Network, puts it: “People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken with Washington’s embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal t
rucks.”3 And it has taken the extractive industries, so accustomed to calling the shots, entirely by surprise: suddenly, no major new project, no matter how seemingly routine, is a done deal.

  In the Skouries forest near Ierissos where our van was stopped, the catalyst was a plan by the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold to clear-cut a large swath of old-growth forest and reengineer the local water system in order to build a massive open-pit gold and copper mine, along with a processing plant, and a large underground mine.4 We were pulled over in a part of the forest that will be leveled to make way for a large dam and tailings pond, to be filled with liquid waste from the mining operation. It was like visiting someone who had just been given six months to live.

  Many of the people who reside in the villages nearby, who depend on this mountain for freshwater, are adamantly opposed to the mine. They fear for the health of their children and livestock, and are convinced that such a large-scale, toxic industrial operation has no place in a region highly dependent on tourism, fishing, and farming. Locals have expressed their opposition through every means they can think of. In a vacation community like this, that can make for odd juxtapositions: militant marches past miniature amusement parks and heated late night political meetings in thatched-roof bars that specialize in blender drinks. Or a local cheese maker, the pride of the village for his Guinness Book of World Records largest ever goat cheese, arrested and held in pretrial detention for weeks. Based on circumstantial evidence, the cheese maker and other villagers were suspects in an incident in which mining trucks and bulldozers were torched by masked intruders.I5