pickSuper timely as this summer has had fires across the globe! I love reading Naomi Klein, but often when reading her longer works get too angry to complete. Here the articles all thematically under the environmental umbrella push the problem and the hope for the solution. I can‘t say I feel like I know anymore in terms of me making an impact- but I sure know what to look for when I vote next!
We can do more to connect the dots between economic injustice, racial injustice, and gender injustice...those ugly systems that place one group in a position of dominance over another (based on skin color, religious faith, gender, and sexual orientation) has consistently serve the interests of power and money, and always have. They do it by keeping us divided, and keeping themselves protected.
We live in capitalism, it‘s power seems inescapable— but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.
There are many such sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to rot after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. It‘s a lot like how this culture treats people.
I spend the eclipse sitting outside alone, staring at the horizon, clinging to the dying light. A week after neo-Nazis marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, and with so much of the world engulfed in actual infernos, the sudden dimming of our world just feels too damn literal.
That‘s what Trump‘s electoral victory is telling us. That it‘s time to put everything we have into shifting from a culture of endless taking to a culture of consent and caretaking. Caring for the planet, and for one another.
We cannot play “my crisis is more urgent than your crisis”— war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race. That trumping game, my friends, is how you end up with a Trump.
You cannot cast a ballot for someone who is so openly riling up race, gender, and physical ability based-hatreds unless, on some level, you think those issues aren‘t that important. You just can‘t do it. You can‘t do it unless you are willing to sacrifice “the other” for your (hoped-for) gain.
If there is a single, overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the power of direct appeals to power over “the other”—the migrant, the Muslim, black people, women.
We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality; caring for one another/the planet could be the economy‘s fastest growing sectors; more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving time to enjoy our loved ones, flourish our communities.
All you morons vomiting your xenophobia...about how money should only be spent “on our own” need to look at yourselves closely in the mirror. I request you ask yourselves a very important question...Am I a decent and honorable human being? Because home isn‘t just the UK, home is everywhere on this planet. —Liam Cox
Shielded from the elements as we are in our climate-controlled homes, workplaces, and cars, we can find the changes unfolding in the natural world passing us by. We might have no idea that a historic drought is destroying the crops on the farms that surround our urban homes.
“Why don‘t the people just leave?”...Many do. And the departure is linked, in part to the thousands of indigenous women in Canada who have been murdered or gone missing, often in big cities. Press reports rarely draw a connection between violence against women and violence against the land, but one exists.
The Irish Celtic tradition also managed to maintain a sense of “divine in the natural world. Water sources had a divinity about them. Trees had a divinity to them.”
When climate justice had to fight for air time with the denunciations of gay marriage, it didn‘t stand a chance.
Few of us live where our ancestors are buried. Many of us abandon our homes lightly…and as we do so, we are severed from whatever knowledge of place we managed to accumulate at the previous stop, and from the knowledge amassed by our ancestors.
So much of our economy relies on the assumption that there is always an “away” into which we can throw our waste. But the lesson, is that ours is “a world in which there is no ‘away.‘ “
Calling the earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe. If many of us absorbed this lesson at long last, the implications would be profound.
Nature is to be put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were by new art and the hand of man. —Sir Francis Bacon, 1623
Up until the 1600s, the earth was seen as alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans, like indigenous people the world over, believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform or desecrate “the mother”.
New England, New France, New Amsterdam, New South Wales— Proof positive that Europeans would never run out of nature to exhaust. And when one swath of this new territory grew depleted or crowded, the frontier would simply advance and new “new worlds” would be named and claimed.
The future isn‘t cast into one inevitable course. On the contrary, we could cause the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth‘s history, or we could create a prosperous civilization, sustainable over the long haul. Either is possible starting from now. —Kim Stanley Robinson
pickI knew I‘d love it and it lived up to my expectations 100%. A collection of essays on quite varied topics in a lot of countries, Germany Canada USA/Puerto Rico France and the UK, on disparate topics coming together to present the scientific and social case for a green new deal. Never too depressing, the best thing about Naomi Klein is that I never feel defeated, I feel like I can change the world.
#24b42020 @Andrew65 @TheReadingMermaid @jb72
Kicking off the second day of #24b42020 with coffee and Naomi Klein. At nearly 3 hours reading now but then i need to go to my uncles house to see family for a holiday meal so I won‘t get much done in the middle of the day. This is a new mug that my mum v kindly bought me as a late Christmas present in Canterbury yesterday, I love it!
@TheReadingMermaid @Andrew65 @jb72
After listening to the great farmer-poet Wendell Berry deliver a lecture on how we each have a duty to love our “homeplace” more than any other, I asked him if he had any advice for rootless people like me and my friends, who disappear into our screens and always seem to be shopping for the perfect community where we should put down roots. “Stop somewhere,” he replied. “And begin the thousand year long process of knowing that place.”
Kicking off the #24b42020 readathon with 20 minutes in the bath with Naomi Klein and yep she made me cry. I almost don‘t want to read the book because I love her so much I can‘t bear not having another book by her to read next? Do you guys ever get that?
@TheReadingMermaid @Andrew65 @jb72
“It‘s going to take an all-out war on pollution and poverty and racism and colonialism and despair all at the same time.”
Even in difficult times and in books on difficult topics, Naomi Klein is the one writer in the world I can always rely on to keep me fighting. After this book I‘ll have read every word she‘s ever published but I‘ll always come back when I need more motivation to keep working for a better world
I normally never start new books before I finish the ones I‘m reading but I‘ve been so down about politics recently only Naomi will do. She feels like my best friend when I get down about the state of the world, she rallies me to stand up for what I believe and work hard. I‘ve been saving this one for a difficult time and it feels like a bff coming to the rescue
pickI‘d give this a higher rating if the information in here didn‘t completely piss me off😜. I‘m a strong supporter of the Green New Deal and this collection of essays gave me some new anecdotes to include in my tirades of why we should support it. However, this book doesn‘t delve into the matter deeply, but gives strong reasons to support a major investment into our future.
😍😍😍🔥🔥🔥
@Emilymdxn
Best night ever!!!
@Emilymdxn I know you also love Naomi Klein so I'm tagging you. 😊
Y'all I'm going to this tonight and I'm so excited. I finally live somewhere with cool author events (why do authors never come to the South?). Tonight I get to go to Naomi Klein's event in Oakland and tomorrow night I get to go to a San Francisco event with Rebecca Solnit speaking. I get to see two heroes in person within 24 hours. 😭😭😭❤️❤️❤️
On Fire: the Burning Case for a Green New Deal | 
