As a part of the 2015 Eden Mills Writer’s Festival, Naomi Klein took the stage at University of Guelph’s War Memorial Hall and delivered a lecture to an eager crowd on Sept. 12. The subject of her lecture involved a discussion on various topics from her newest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. While Klein has gained international recognition for her previous books No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, which tackled both consumerism and disaster capitalism, her new book resonates with readers in an entirely different way. Klein once again emerged as a voice of urgency poised to expose fundamental problems with our handling of climate change.
Klein began the lecture by discussing “Have You Ever Seen a Moose?”—a children’s story about a moose that her son adores. While reading a passage from her own book, Klein wonders if her son will ever get the chance to physically see a moose in his lifetime. With our carbon emissions steadily harming the atmosphere in drastic ways, the chances of seeing a moose in the wild may very well be coming to an end as wildlife populations dwindle. It is with these grim realities—the realities of environmental harm and economic exploit—that Klein sets out to illuminate in This Changes Everything.
Throughout her lecture, Klein emphasized the importance and urgency for climate change to become a major issue in the upcoming federal elections in Canada. Not only is Canada’s economic structure based heavily around oil and environmental exploitation, but also, the failure to secure sustainable and renewable energy can be attributed to the incompatibility of neo-liberalism and climate change action. Klein argued that we need to shift our political ideology and economic system to become more receptive to communities taking action and protecting their environment. With a global crisis like climate change, a political structure that prevents collective action can be detrimental to the progression of science and the radical consequences later generations will have to face.
As the lecture continued, Klein offered a variety of examples to illustrate the significance a shift in political and structural ideology can have. Specifically, Klein took note of the cost of renewable energy sources, and how in some countries, legislation is being enacted to make these sources locally or communally owned. In our current neo-liberal structure, the free market economy and deregulation allows for companies to systematically cause environmental harm in ways that restrict locals from being involved and active. Further, Klein made reference to a phenomena called “blockadia,” which directly addresses this missing sense of collective action. Blockadia is a term that sprung from protests of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas where activists would physically occupy the space of the pipeline’s proposed trajectory. For Klein, blockadia is a significant term that illustrates the willingness of individuals to actively become involved in the preservation of the environment.
In an interview with Democracy Now, Klein expands upon the concept of blockadia and its importance for her overall project.
“Blockadia is really this transnational space, roving space, where regular people are stepping in where our leaders are failing, and they are trying to stop this era of extreme extraction with their bodies or in the courts,” said Klein. “French anti-fracking activists have a slogan, ‘Ni ici, ni ailleurs,’ ‘Not here or anywhere,’—and that’s really the spirit of blockadia. It’s drawing the line. And you often hear that slogan whether people are fighting pipelines, or fighting fracking, or coal export terminals up and down the Pacific Northwest,” continued Klein.
While Klein’s book looks heavily into the different kinds of systems being applied around the world in order to promote renewable energy sources, she does an excellent job addressing the current state of our economic structure. Klein critically questions not only the activities of large oil companies, but she also calls out the actions of large ‘green’ and supposedly eco-friendly companies. A number of prominent green organizations have turned to making partnerships with large corporations—these partnerships, made possible by neo-liberalism, affects the environmental movement in a detrimental way. Klein recognizes the importance of being critical towards all types of organizations, and her dedication to her message was evident throughout the entirety of the lecture.
Rob Nixon, a prominent environmentalist and author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, reviewed Klein’s newest book for The New York Times. Specifically, Nixon mentioned Klein’s ability to seek out and address fundamental flaws from a variety of discourses that, when occurring together, impedes the progress of environmental action on a political and economic level.
“Klein diagnoses impressively what hasn’t worked. No more claptrap about fracked gas as a bridge to renewables. Enough already of the international summit meetings that produce sirocco-quality hot air, and nonbinding agreements that bind us all to more emissions,” writes Nixon. “Klein dismantles the boondoggle that is cap and trade. She skewers grandiose command-and-control schemes to re-engineer the planet’s climate. No point, when a hubristic mind-set has gotten us into this mess, to pile on further hubris. She reserves a special scorn for the partnerships between big green organizations and immense carbon, peddled as win-win for everyone, but which haven’t slowed emissions. Such partnerships remind us that when the lamb and the lion lie down together, only one of them gets eaten.”
Klein is truly a one-of-a kind intellectual—her consistency and clarity when discussing crucial issues such as deregulation and divestment can’t help but draw her audience in. Amidst discussions of her book and the importance of spreading her message to the individual, Klein encouraged people to see the film version of This Changes Everything, which premiered on Sept. 16 at Toronto’s International Film Festival. Needless to say, Klein’s lecture at the U of G was enlightening and fulfilling. After a short Q&A session and book signing took place and the crowd started filing out, it was evident that Klein’s message had resonated with many—everything needs to change.