This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  As Indigenous-inspired ideas have spread in these somewhat surprising contexts, something else is happening too: many people are remembering their own cultures’ stewardship traditions, however deeply buried, and recognizing humanity’s role as one of life promotion. The notion that we could separate ourselves from nature, that we did not need to be in perpetual partnership with the earth around us, is, after all, a relatively new concept, even in the West. Indeed it was only once humans came up with the lethal concept of the earth as an inert machine and man its engineer, that some began to forget the duty to protect and promote the natural cycles of regeneration on which we all depend.

  The good news is that not everybody agreed to forget. Another of the more interesting and unexpected side effects of the extreme energy frenzy is that, faced with heightened threats to collective safety, these old ideas are reasserting themselves—cross-pollinating, hybridizing, and finding applications in new contexts.

  In Halkidiki, Greece, for instance, as villagers defend their land against open-pit gold mining, the secret weapon has been the intergenerational character of the struggle—teenage girls in skinny jeans and big sunglasses standing side by side with their black-clad grandmothers in orthopedic shoes. This is something new: before the miners threatened the mountain and the streams, many old people had been forgotten, parked at home in front of their TVs, stuffed away like outdated cell phones. But as the villages organized, local young people discovered that, though they were expert at certain things, like flash-mob-style organizing and getting their messages out on social media, their grandparents—who had survived wars and occupations—knew a great deal more about living and working in large groups. Not only could they cook for fifty people (an important skill on the barricades), but they remembered a time when agriculture was done collectively, and were able to help their children and grandchildren believe that it was possible to live well without tearing up the land.

  In “young” countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, which tend to have myths rather than memories, this remembering process is far more complex. For descendants of settlers and newer immigrants, it begins with learning the true histories of where we live—with reading treaties, for instance, and coming to terms with how we ended up with what we have, however painful. And yet Mike Scott, the goat rancher and environmentalist at the forefront of Montana’s anti-coal fight, says that the process of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people working closely together “has reawakened a worldview in a lot of people.”40

  The deep sense of interdependence with the natural world that animates rural Blockadia struggles from Greece to coastal British Columbia is, of course, far less obvious in the densely populated cities where so many of us live and work: where our reliance on nature is well hidden by highways, pipes, electrical lines, and overstocked supermarkets. It is only when something in this elaborately insulated system cracks, or comes under threat, that we catch glimpses of how dependent and vulnerable we really are.

  And yet these cracks are appearing with greater regularity. At a time when unprecedented wildfires engulf suburban homes in Melbourne, when waters from the rising Thames flood homes in London commuter towns, and when Superstorm Sandy transforms the New York subway into a canal system, the barriers that even the most urban and privileged among us have erected to hold back the natural world are clearly starting to break down.

  Sometimes it is extreme extraction that breaks down those barriers, as its tentacles creep into our most modern cities—with fracking in backyards in Los Angeles and proposed tar sands pipelines running through cities like Toronto. Sydney’s residents had little reason to think about where their drinking water was coming from—but when it looked like the source of the Australian city’s water was going to get fracked, a great many people educated themselves fast. In truth, we never lost our connections with nature—they were always there, in our bodies and under our paved lives. A great many of us just forgot about them for a while.

  * * *

  As communities move from simply resisting extractivism to constructing the world that must rise in its rubble, protecting the fertility cycle is at the heart of the most rapidly multiplying models, from permaculture to living buildings to rainwater harvesting. Again and again, linear, one-way relationships of pure extraction are being replaced with systems that are circular and reciprocal. Seeds are saved instead of purchased. Water is recycled. Animal manure, not chemicals, is used as fertilizer, and so on. There are no hard-and-fast formulas, since the guiding principle is that every geography is different and our job, as Wes Jackson says (citing Alexander Pope), is to “consult the genius of the place.”41 There is, however, a recurring pattern: systems are being created that require minimal external inputs and produce almost no waste—a quest for homeostasis that is the opposite of the Monster Earth that the would-be geoengineers tell us we must learn to love.

  And contrary to capitalism’s drift toward monopoly and duopoly in virtually every arena, these systems mimic nature’s genius for built-in redundancy by amplifying diversity wherever possible, from more seed varieties to more sources of energy and water. The goal becomes not to build a few gigantic green solutions, but to infinitely multiply smaller ones, and to use policies—like Germany’s feed-in tariff for renewable energy, for instance—that encourage multiplication rather than consolidation. The beauty of these models is that when they fail, they fail on a small and manageable scale—with backup systems in place. Because if there is one thing we know, it’s that the future is going to have plenty of shocks.

  Living nonextractively does not mean that extraction does not happen: all living things must take from nature in order to survive. But it does mean the end of the extractivist mindset—of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration. Even such traditionally destructive practices as logging can be done responsibly, as can small-scale mining, particularly when the activities are controlled by the people who live where the extraction is taking place and who have a stake in the ongoing health and productivity of the land. But most of all, living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated: deriving our food from farming methods that protect soil fertility; our energy from methods that harness the ever-renewing strength of the sun, wind, and waves; our metals from recycled and reused sources.

  These processes are sometimes called “resilient” but a more appropriate term might be “regenerative.” Because resilience—though certainly one of nature’s greatest gifts—is a passive process, implying the ability to absorb blows and get back up. Regeneration, on the other hand, is active: we become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity.

  This is a far more expansive vision than the familiar eco-critique that stressed smallness and shrinking humanity’s impact or “footprint.” That is simply not an option today, not without genocidal implications: we are here, we are many, and we must use our skills to act. We can, however, change the nature of our actions so that they are constantly growing, rather than extracting life. “We can build soil, pollinate, compost and decompose,” Gopal Dayaneni, a grassroots ecologist and activist with the Oakland, California, based Movement Generation, told me. “We can accelerate, simply though our labor, the restoration and regeneration of living systems, if we engage in thoughtful, concerted action. We are actually the keystone species in this moment so we have to align our strategies with the healing powers of Mother Earth—there is no getting around the house rules. But it isn’t about stopping or retreating. It’s about aggressively applying our labor toward restoration.”42

  That spirit is already busily at work promoting and protecting life in the face of so many life-negating and life-forgetting threats. It has even reached the creek where I used to take hikes during my pregnancy. When I first discovered the trail, I had thought that the salmon that still swam
in the stream were there purely thanks to the species’ indomitable will. But as I met and spoke with locals on those walks, I learned that since 1992 the fish had been helped along by a hatchery a few kilometers upstream, as well as by teams of volunteers that worked to clear the water of logging debris and made sure there was enough shade to protect the young fry. Hundreds of thousands of pink, coho, chum, and chinook fry are released into nearby streams each year. It’s a partnership of sorts between the fish, the forest, and the people who share this special piece of the world.

  So about two months after my son was born, our little family went on a field trip to that hatchery, now being powered through micro turbines and geothermal. Though he was so small he could barely see over the sling, I wanted him to meet some of the baby salmon that had been so important to me before he was born. It was fun: we peered together into the big green tanks where the young fish were being kept safe until they grew strong enough to protect themselves. And we went home with a “salmon alphabet” poster that still hangs in his room (“s” is for smolt).

  This was not a fish farm or a fertility factory—nothing was being created from scratch or forced. It was just a helping hand, a boost to keep the fertility cycle going. And it’s an expression of the understanding that from here on, when we take, we must not only give back, but we must also take care.

  * * *

  I. The dolphin die-off did not restrict itself to the young. By the end of April 2014, over one thousand dead dolphins, of all ages, had been discovered along the Gulf Coast, part of what NOAA termed an “unusual mortality event.” Those numbers only scratch the surface of the death toll.

  II. New research published in May 2014 in the journal Human Reproduction shows a strong connection between stress and infertility. The study followed roughly five hundred women in the U.S. as they were trying to conceive, none of them with known fertility problems. It discovered that women whose saliva measured high for alpha-amylase—a biomarker for stress—were twice as likely to be diagnosed as infertile as those with low levels.

  III. When Ecuador adopted a new constitution in 2008, it became the first country to enshrine the rights of nature in law. Article 71 of the country’s constitution states: “Nature or Pachamama, where the life is created and reproduced, has as a right that its existence is integrally respected as well as the right of the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structures, functions and evolutionary processes. Every person, community, people or nationality can demand from the public authority that these rights of nature are fulfilled.” Similar principles were enshrined in the “Peoples Agreement” of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which was adopted by 30,000 members of international civil society gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in April 2010. Noting that, “the regenerative capacity of the planet has been already exceeded,” the agreement asserts that the earth has “the right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue its vital cycles and processes free of human alteration.”

  Conclusion

  * * *

  The Leap Years

  Just Enough Time for Impossible

  “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented society’ to a ‘person-oriented society.’ When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

  —Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” 19671

  “Developed countries have created a global crisis based on a flawed system of values. There is no reason we should be forced to accept a solution informed by that same system.”

  —Marlene Moses, Ambassador to the U.N. for Nauru, 20092

  In December 2012, Brad Werner—a complex systems researcher with pink hair and a serious expression—made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. That year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of NASA’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the filmmaker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles. But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).3

  Standing at the front of the conference room, the University of California, San Diego professor took the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that rather direct question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations, and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When a journalist pressed Werner for a clear answer on the “Is Earth f**ked” question, he set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”4

  There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner described it as “resistance”—movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture.” According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by Indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups.” Such mass uprisings of people—along the lines of the abolition movement and the civil rights movement—represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control.5

  This, he argued, is clear from history, which tells us that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved.” It stands to reason, therefore, that “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.” And that, Werner said, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem.”6

  Put another way, only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on. The only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road, and simultaneously clear some alternate pathways to destinations that are safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything.

  * * *

  The movements explored in these pages—Blockadia’s fast multiplying local outposts, the fossil fuel divestment/reinvestment movement, the local laws barring high-risk extraction, the bold court challenges by Indigenous groups and others—are early manifestations of this resistance. They have not only located various choke points to slow the expansion plans of the fossil fuel companies, but the economic alternatives these movements are proposing and building are mapping ways of living within planetary boundaries, ones based on intricate reciprocal relationships rather than brute extraction. This is the “friction” to which Werner referred, the kind that is needed to put the brakes on the forces of destruction and destabilization.

  When I despair of the prospects for change, I think back on some of what I have witnessed in the five years of writing of this book. Admittedly, much of it is painful. From the young climate activist breaking down and weeping on my shoulder at the Copenhagen summit, to the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute literally laughing at the prospect of extinction. From the country manor in England where mad scientists plotted to blot out the sun, to the stillness of the b
lackened marshes during the BP oil disaster. From the roar of the earth being ripped up to scrape out the Alberta tar sands, to the shock of discovering that the largest green group in the world was itself drilling for oil.

  But that’s not all I think about. When I started this journey, most of the resistance movements standing in the way of the fossil fuel frenzy either did not exist or were a fraction of their current size. All were significantly more isolated from one another than they are today. North Americans, overwhelmingly, did not know what the tar sands were. Most of us had never heard of fracking. There had never been a truly mass march against climate change in North America, let alone thousands willing to engage together in civil disobedience. There was no mass movement to divest from fossil fuels. Hundreds of cities and towns in Germany had not yet voted to take back control over their electricity grids to be part of a renewable energy revolution. My own province did not have a green energy program that was bold enough to land us in trade court. The environmental news out of China was almost exclusively awful. There was far less top-level research proving that economies powered by 100 percent renewable energy were within our grasp. Only the isolated few dared question the logic of economic growth. And few climate scientists were willing to speak bluntly about the political implications of their work for our frenzied consumer culture. All of this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing that I have had to race to keep up. Yes, ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected, but resistance is beginning to boil. In these existing and nascent movements we now have a clear glimpses of the kind of dedication and imagination demanded of everyone who is alive and breathing during climate change’s “decade zero.”