Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’: a review | Transition Network.
Reading a Naomi Klein book is always a deeply absorbing experience. In a sense, the sheer size of them means you have no choice other than to be absorbed (This Changes Everything runs to almost 600 pages). Her two previous masterworks, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine were mind-altering and life-changing for me. This Changes Everythingis Klein’s climate change book. It is a powerful, deeply felt, painstakingly-researched book which takes the reader on an incredible journey and makes a radical yet common-sense case. So why is it that by the end I felt underwhelmed?
There is much about the book that is fantastic. She brilliantly unpicks the complexities of our headlong plunge into climate chaos. She destroys the “austerity or extraction” myth, reframing it as “poverty or poisoning”. She sets out the passionate case that:
“climate change is, in fact, a massive job creator, as well as a community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce commodity indeed”.
She identifies capitalism, in particular our current what she calls “extractivist” version, as the central driver of the crisis, but argues that climate change should be the rallying call around which the alternative is built. We’ve tried it the neo-liberals’ way for the last 20 years, she says, and “the soaring emissions speak for themselves”.
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