When I heard the broadcast review of Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs. the Climate, Simon & Schuster, ©2014 I knew I had to buy it, read it and share it. The scope of the book is enormous; it opens in a chapter titled 'The Right Is Right - the Revolutionary Power of Climate Change,' allowing that the conservative right on the political spectrum, the ones most invested in the fossil fuel economy, are the ones who distinctly grasp that ending our extractive relationship with the earth would amount to throwing off the whole economic order that has enriched them. The tycoons of industries including oil, automotive, armaments, airlines, banking and agriculture, all so heavily wrapped in expectations of steady profit from steady growth, are the ones from whose ranks the founders of organizations like the Heartland Institute or the Competitive Enterprise Institute have come. Denying publicly that our activities could add up to anything unbalancing the climate is within the mission of these groups. They want climate catastrophe to be a hoax because only that would uphold the system in which they are experts at building wealth. Unlike the liberal other side, which has sought through various political and techno-means to impose curbs on the release of carbon--whether or not in practice obeying air quality regulations or investing in hybrid or plug-in cars or renewable energy--the right admits that relinquishing our oil, gas and coal-fired largesse would be the end of the capitalist system as we know it. The big-business liberal side has had trouble alluding to this fact in their policy statements.
Chapters further into the book take on the commonly held notion that technological innovation will not only save these same industries--in particular, commercial air travel, a notorious source of carbon emissions--but also leave room for their unlimited growth, and that all we need to do is to wait for engineering geniuses to come up with new clean fuels so we can get on with our lives. In fact, the speed at which we're overtaking the threshold of 2 degrees Celsius that has been set as the presumed safe limit to global warming does not leave time for that kind of waiting much less security through more, albeit cleaner, energy and transport.
Ms. Klein alludes repeatedly to the huge inequalities all over the world, in monetary wealth and opportunity and, as a consequence, in legal clout, engendered by affiliation with or lack of affiliation with the dominant economy. The dire imperative that we break up the consortia that profit from defacing the earth to go after petroleum, bitumen, coal, sulfides, diamonds, in sectors where they've never before been touched--corporations that would seemingly not care if their processes broke the planet into separate chunks spinning and spilling into outer space--opens paths to salvation for societies all over the world who face displacement by the giants. Redressing the crises in climate and the biosphere would also mean empowering countless individuals in all manner of storied or little-known places. This theme adds up to a current of optimism in Ms. Klein's book about climate catastrophe, a subject nearly as grim as any of the oldest tales about the destruction of the world at the hand of ogres, or justice for the sinful lot of us in the Biblical book of Revelation.
Subsequent chapters look at localized movements that have succeeded so far in stopping frack wells, for example, or transit corridors for coal and oil, because the people who were in the way had no choice but to stake their whole land-based livelihoods against the operators of the capitalist-backed ventures which collectively amount to such a force of destruction. Indigenous peoples in their longstanding respect for earth not as a mere cache of raw treasures, or just a big rock washed by treacherous seas, but as a mother and repository of ancestors may be the best examples of whose culture will survive all that we're doing (if, as I say, there will be any survivors, given everything that's self-serving and ignorant in human nature.)
Partly by reading Ms. Klein's acknowledgements crediting all her helpers in researching the topics and preparing the book's text, I was heartened to think of all the many enlightened visions being shared around the world about things that we will have to do in a new age not powered by dirty fuel. Imagine the whole world, with all its economies run by wind, sun, hydro and muscle power as of old through a technological know-how integrating these energies on a sweeping scale that's virtually equal to our modern-day collective demand. While the movement to divest from oil and reinvest in renewable energies goes on, and deadly conflict at the frontiers represented by pipeline routes becomes an ever likelier part of history, seemingly more of us than ever continue pursuing what is happening with the birds, fish and other wildlife. I make and sell nature art to earn a living, and so I keep heading out for secretive sneak peaks at these creatures and their support system, preferring to go by foot or on skis, on a mountain bike or hybrid car.
On whatever front each of us exerts ourselves while seeing the overworked world for what it is, whether we're negotiating to increase the heating and cooling efficiencies of houses and public buildings, connecting North American First Nations tribal members with the financial resources to be their own job creators so they need not hire themselves out to coal and oil rigs, teaching children of the slums about nature and available services from nature in their home regions, teaching individuals bored to death by automated, denatured processes about the enjoyment of providing for ourselves by hand and controlling our own food and surroundings like never before---there will be newfound joy. There can be prolonged joy in discovering that what we thought was irreparably lost is really in reach, or was never really gone.
A Thawing Scene - 'March Marshland at Crex Meadows' - original watercolor matted on handmade cattail-fibre paper
Today I'll go out to the woods and swamp in their January hush, around saplings gnawed by deer in a shortage of the maligned four-legged predators like wolves that make deer scarcer, pathways crusted with a snow that never really gained any depth so far this winter, burning my calories on my skis and looking for the most interesting snags and stumps, ones full of suggestiveness, almost like driftwood propped up ready for a carver to animate with hand tools. Even though it's unnecessary I still photograph them as specimens for reference in my weird new swampland painting. I've got a little net bag made by somebody out of a recycled athletic jersey which I'll fill with the dried leaves of Labrador tea so these can further dry inside the house and become tea leaves for me or whoever wants to try some. The low-growing shrub of wet cold ground, Labrador tea (Ledum groenlandicum), will shoot out baby leaves in May or so and flower again, lavish and white, in the month of June unless we have a hot, advanced spring as is increasingly possible, affecting all blooming. It becomes urgent to me to get out and come back in and document what characterizes Saint Louis County, Minnesota and nearby Ontario because it will change, yet there will be witnesses who mourn the losses and replacements but go on with their own lives and old enthusiasms...I somehow trust and expect.
