NAOMI KLEIN’S CALL TO ARMS

Cornelia Parker in More Intelligent Life:

I’ve never met Klein, though I would very much like to—but I went to see her speak about her latest book in London. I was shocked by how young she still is, and obviously she’s beautiful, but mostly she is brave: she speaks her mind, articulately and powerfully. There are lots of people that wouldn’t like her to say the things she says, but she says them anyway, and that’s what I admire. The first book I read of hers was “No Logo”, and then “The Shock Doctrine”, which was amazing, and now “This Changes Everything”, which I think is much, much needed. Somebody needed to write an intelligent book about climate change and its politics, because politics is the main reason we are all so blindly riding the boat over the waterfall.

Klein takes the position that custodianship of the planet is at odds with capitalism. The so-called free world is actually run by corporations, and it’s not in their financial interest for us all to get alarmed about our future. (And this though they’ve got children.) What Klein has done is to flag up the huge amount of disinformation that stops us taking the action we need to take. Every politician should be duty-bound to act on climate change, but they don’t because there are too many corporate hands in their jar, as it were. Klein says that China may be able to act because it isn’t a democracy yet; its government can say “you can have only one child”, and everybody has to jump. China could lead a new economic world order because it will be able to make big changes fast. We can’t, because capitalism keeps interrupting. So somehow we’ve got to have a huge paradigm shift, and that’s what Klein is trying to tell us. It’s a call to arms.

More here.