Berger reviews Klein's "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate"
John Berger recently published a two-part review of Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014) on The Huffington Post:
In the aftermath of the fractious recently concluded global climate talks in Lima, Peru, Naomi Klein's remarkable book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014) takes on new relevance for everyone yearning for solutions to the climate crisis.
The book is a deeply insightful and unflinching look at the global threats posed by climate change, environmental devastation, and economic injustice.
We must confront them, Klein says, by first ripping away the ideological underpinnings of the political and economic systems that created and perpetuate these parallel crises. That underlying ideology is a belief in the virtues of unregulated, free-market capitalism.
After delegitimizing it, we must tackle economic inequality, environmental injustice, and climate change in a unified way, Klein maintains. That's because they are inextricably interrelated and because the climate crisis may be our last and best chance to simultaneously save civilization and redress its wrongs.
Klein is an extraordinarily gifted writer and visionary, Big Picture strategic thinker, but is her hugely ambitious agenda really feasible? What she's proposing is a very tall order -- more so even than saving the climate.
The key, she tells us, is to build a broad social movement founded on basic moral values and ecological principles rather than those of unfettered free enterprise, profit maximization, and perpetual economic growth, fueled by fossil fuels and other natural resources.
How do we do build that movement? Part two of this review examines whether Klein has provided a credible answer to that question.
