135 pages • 4 hours read
Naomi KleinThis Changes Everything
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is a Canadian political writer and social activist, famous for her work on globalization and late capitalism, in particular her ground-breaking book No Logo (1999), which won her international acclaim. No Logo offers a critique of consumer culture and global capitalism. Her political perspective throughout her work and This Changes Everything could be characterized as progressive and left-wing, but not in the traditional sense of the term. Klein is a writer of what has sometimes been called part of the “New Left,” a movement that puts the emphasis on local, grassroots struggles and resists centralizing narratives and concepts. This is reflected when she doesn’t dwell on the roles of traditional political parties in the struggle against climate change. Klein remains an influential intellectual voice and continues to campaign for the social and environmental causes described above.
Klein is not a neutral or disengaged author. True to the activist spirit of her politics, her personal experience and political perspective figure directly in these pages. Her approach repeatedly celebrates grassroots campaigning and those who are grounded in struggle and love for the Earth, and she critiques the distant “astronaut’s view” of climate change. In her own writing and research practices in This Changes Everything, she embodies the opposite principle of political, practical, and emotional involvement. Her research in the book takes her all over the world, and she repeatedly gives flashes of narrative, vivid personal experiences, and recollections that illustrate her emotional involvement in what’s being described. These include being stopped by police in a village in Greece on the frontline of the battle against a new mine, drifting on a boat in Louisiana in polluted waters, and being at climate change denial summits and meetings of the Royal Academy to discuss geoengineering. She watches Red Cloud teach about solar panel installation, goes hiking while pregnant, and watches the salmon swim.
Her approach is that of the exploratory journalist mixed with the activist and political theoretician. The moments of personal recollection in what is predominantly political discourse bring life and color to her work and engage the reader’s imagination while bringing home the realities of the dangers the planet is facing.
Richard Branson
This is a book that focuses more on issues than individuals, and there aren’t actually many figures who receive sustained attention. Branson, however, is one of them, with almost a whole chapter tracing his foray into the environmental movement and his brand of green entrepreneurship. Branson is the British entrepreneur who founded the Virgin Group and built his business empire from a single record shop to the multinational, multisector conglomerate it is today. His personality has always been at the fore of the Virgin brand, making him one of the world’s best-known billionaires.
After meeting with Al Gore in 2006, he launched a high-profile part of his business to combat climate change. He aimed to find a new biofuel that could replace fossil fuels and sponsor technology that could absorb vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Branson becomes, for Klein, the exemplifying case for why we can’t rely on billionaires and business elites to save the world. Despite his vocal commitment to fighting climate change, Branson continued investing in and expanding his fossil fuel-intensive airline business and was hostile to all attempts to regulate the industry. She also points out how the initial bold promises of green investment and radical new green tech have both been dampened in recent years.
Klein reserves judgment as to Branson’s ultimate intentions. She says his green approach may have been genuine but was ultimately always going to lose out when it came into conflict with the business imperative to make a profit. The lesson for Klein is that we cannot afford to be passive bystanders. Billionaires won’t save us from a climate-change crisis that they helped create, nor can we rely on the emergence of some new miracle technology.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon was a British scientist and philosopher working in the late 1600s and early 1700s. He is often credited as one of the founding figures of empiricism and the modern scientific method, his main contention being that we can use reasoning and careful observation to understand the natural world. By adopting a skeptical and detached approach, we can avoid misleading ourselves.
Klein focuses on Bacon as one of the founding figures of what environmentalists have termed “extractivism,” a domineering and exploitative human relationship to nature that assumes we stand above nature and can use it to our ends. She cites a passage in which Bacon talks in metaphors about chasing, exploring, and penetrating the secrets of nature (170).
There is some truth in Klein’s point: Bacon’s approach to nature and his idea of scientific method was to set the scientist above and apart from nature and to see nature as an object of intellectual scrutiny whose mysteries could be cracked and used for the convenience of human beings. Klein may well be putting too much weight purely on Bacon; he was but one part of an intellectual and industrial movement that was developing at the time. However, as with Branson, Bacon becomes emblematic of the problems with a certain perspective.
Perhaps we also need to put Klein’s criticism of Bacon’s extractivism in the context of the time. Bacon’s era was one in which human beings still didn’t have a great deal of control over the forces of nature. Bacon’s scientific method, if partly responsible for the negative extractivist actions of industrial society, is surely also responsible for its more positive aspects, including the discovery of electricity; advancements in transportation; improvements in our understanding of medicine, illness, and sanitation; and research that would lead to solar panels and wind farms, to give just a few examples. In this respect, it could be argued that Klein may be drawing too black and white a picture of those early scientific and industrial developments she describes.
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