Naomi Klein: rallying for change through stories

Environmental Humanities Column, Center for the Arts and Humanities

Naomi Klein is a New York Times best-selling author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her ideas and critiques of corporate globalization and free-market capitalism.

Klein was selected by the Center for the Arts and Humanities to do double duty as the 2020 Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities and the Fall 2020 keynote speaker for this year’s humanities theme: Boundaries and Margins.

As part of her virtual residency, Klein has visited multiple classes.

On Tuesday, Oct. 6, she also held a webinar public event. In this webinar, she discussed the global climate crisis and steps we should take to tackle the problem.

While she covered many topics such as jobs, social justice, and the disparity between developed and developing countries, the main point that I took from her talk was that inclusivity is key.

I learned that in order to turn this crisis around, we can’t just leave all the decision-making to those in governmental and corporate power.

Climate action needs to be embraced and considered in all aspects of society, as well as broadened in order to include those whose voices have historically been marginalized in the movement.

Klein delves further into these ideas in her documentaries The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, both based on two best-selling books that she has written of the same name.

This Changes Everything focuses specifically on climate change, I decided to watch it as a continuation to her talk. The film was made over four years and spans five continents, where Klein visits areas that have been impacted by climate change and land use.

She chronicles the stories of land activists in New York, Montana, Canada, Greece, India, China, and Germany.

Throughout the film, Klein emphasizes the point that humans have been led to believe that because of science, Mother Nature is the machine and they are the engineers.

Since the Industrial Revolution, human society has been stuck in an endless cycle of feeding this industry with fossil fuels, all without replenishing what they have plundered from the Earth.

Of course, this cycle is unsustainable, which Klein illustrates with the stories of land, human, and resource exploitation in the name of economic growth.

This elusive goal of economic prosperity, Klein argues, is what will ultimately be our downfall unless we can change the current cycle.

While Klein does say at the end of the film that this crisis is ultimately about all of us coming together to stop climate change, the film consistently pushes this “us versus them” narrative, specifically in regards to the people living on the exploited land and the government and corporations looming over them.

While I can see why this narrative would be utilized in order to best tell the stories in the film, I fear that this tactic could alienate some viewers, especially when this narrative is combined with Klein’s critiques of capitalism.

In addition, I wished that the film had delved further into ideas of how to change the current system in place, which she had mentioned in her talk. Granted, solutions for this problem are extremely complex, but I still would have liked to hear more about her ideas regarding systemic change, rather than briefly mentioning Germany as an example of positive climate action.

Overall, it was a good film that showcased moving stories of people impacted by the government’s incessant need for economic growth.

Klein is a masterful story-teller who is not afraid to call out some of the most powerful people on the planet. In order to stand a chance in fighting climate change, we need more people like her at the helm.

~ Lucia Middleton, `22, Environmental Humanities Student Advisory Board