Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Naomi Klein's new book, On Fire . . .
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Billy_T.
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November 2, 2019 at 5:07 pm #107670
Billy_TParticipantAs mentioned in the other thread, it’s excellent. I’m thru page 123, and getting a ton from it. Just out this past month, I think . . . it’s basically set up like this: A fairly long intro, written recently, followed by a collection of essays starting in 2010, taking us up close to the present . . . followed by an epilogue, which I assume is as current as the intro.
It looks like a lot of the essays are available online, though they won’t have her updates via notes. Biggest takeaway so far: Klein gets the fact that climate change has already wreaked incredible havoc, and will accelerate beyond our ability to handle the changes if we don’t act and act radically, now. She has the facts and the sources to prove that. She also gets that our economic system itself stands in the way of all viable solutions. As in, as long as we continue with the capitalist system, we are essentially doomed. Again, she has the facts and sources to back that up, and from my reading, the logic is inescapable.
And it’s not just the endless Grow or Die loop of ever increasing production, consumption, extraction, waste and pollution needed to make capitalism work. It’s not just the baked-in requirement of consuming natural resources at ever accelerating levels, well beyond the limits of Nature to replenish them. It’s also that capitalism comes with an ethos and ideology that scoffs at collective action, trashes it, mocks it, mocks even the attempt to work together for the common good. And in its most sinister form, works aggressively to undermine and/or exterminate such efforts.
Continued below . . .
November 2, 2019 at 5:10 pm #107671Billy_TParticipantAs Klein notes in an essay entitled Climate Time versus the Constant Now (under a different title in The Guardian), the timing couldn’t be worse for us. It’s a horrible mismatch across the board:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/23/climate-change-fight-of-our-lives-naomi-klein
Excerpt:
This is a story about bad timing.
One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.
The migration patterns of many songbird species, for instance, have evolved over millennia so that eggs hatch precisely when food sources such as caterpillars are at their most abundant, providing parents with ample nourishment for their hungry young. But because spring now often arrives early, the caterpillars are hatching earlier too, which means that in some areas they are less plentiful when the chicks hatch, with a number of possible long-term impacts on survival.
Similarly, in West Greenland, caribou are arriving at their calving grounds only to find themselves out of sync with the forage plants they have relied on for thousands of years, now growing earlier thanks to rising temperatures. That is leaving female caribou with less energy for lactation, reproduction and feeding their young, a mismatch that has been linked to sharp decreases in calf births and survival rates.
Scientists are studying cases of climate-related mistiming among dozens of species, from Arctic terns to pied flycatchers. But there is one important species they are missing – us. Homo sapiens. We too are suffering from a terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude – that moment being the tail end of the go-go 80s, the blast-off point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.
November 3, 2019 at 8:19 am #107686Billy_TParticipantAnother essay from the book. A speech given to students from the College of the Atlantic, which I had never heard of before, and sounds pretty amazing.
link: https://lithub.com/naomi-kleins-advice-for-the-next-generation-of-climate-activists/
Not sure how much she revised this, exactly, but it looks pretty much the same.
She makes some amazingly spot-on comments . . . the key point is self-evident.
We can’t solve the climate/pollution crises ourselves, individually. We can only do so together, united.
Excerpt:
A story: When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls, sweet and giggly, spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even ten to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit and harassed. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.
They knew they were being badly exploited, that the garments and gadgets they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me, “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”
So, one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?
It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me with something like pity. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.
This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs, first and very often last, through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local, and boycotting big, evil brands.
These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to rewire our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet, at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience reliably was “What kind of sneakers are okay to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”
The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.
The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.
November 3, 2019 at 10:51 am #107691
wvParticipantNaomi is one of the best voices on ‘the situation.’
She’ll keep writing her books, (god bless her)
and the corporations will continue to destroy the biosphere.
For all the reasons we’ve talked about since 1998 or so. Essentially, the Corporations grew so powerful and their propaganda become so successful,
they dummed-down the American-voters to the point where Salvatore Dali’s Flaming Giraffe is probly an understated metaphor at this point.Forget it Jake, itz the Lorax.
w
vNovember 3, 2019 at 11:21 am #107694Billy_TParticipantNaomi is one of the best voices on ‘the situation.’
She’ll keep writing her books, (god bless her)
and the corporations will continue to destroy the biosphere.
For all the reasons we’ve talked about since 1998 or so. Essentially, the Corporations grew so powerful and their propaganda become so successful,
they dummed-down the American-voters to the point where Salvatore Dali’s Flaming Giraffe is probly an understated metaphor at this point.Forget it Jake, itz the Lorax.
w
vI admire her a ton. And, yeah, your description of the situation is accurate, tragically.
The Burning Giraffe, by Salvador Dali. 1937
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