In Praise of…. This Changes Everything
I don’t often do book reviews on this blog, perhaps because as someone who is occasionally reviewed I assume that everyone else in the scribbling business, like me, wants to avoid reading them. (This is what is known as Very Very Wrong Thinking.)
However, This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein is both good enough and perhaps important enough to merit a bit of conversation. It’s not a barrel of laughs; a book about the entanglement between environmentalism and capitalism, it’s never gonna make your heart soar with incandescent joy.
That said, its greatest strength is perhaps not the clarity with which it expounds on the dangers of climate change, but the clarity with which it addresses both why as a society we have not acted to prevent oncoming disaster, and the optimism of actions which we could take.
To cut a long story short, the headlines are these:
As a global society, we are currently driven by consumerism. Everything about our economy is geared up to the assumption that we want More New Things. Walking hand in hand with consumerism is the logical extension that, if we want stuff, including more wealth, we should permit the companies and corporations which provide More Stuff, to do so pretty much willy-nilly. This matter appears primarily a social one: in Britain, for example, the government recently collected back-taxes from Google for £130 million. Also known as 3% of google’s profit, while the UK base-rate taxpayer pays 20% on everything. The message is clear: giant corporations and the extraordinarily rich can get away with not paying taxes, while everyone else is still subject to the law. This isn’t just a question of massive injustice in the way the world works, and the growing division between rich and poor – taxes are needed because sometimes we have to act as a society, not as a series of self-interested private ventures. To reduce global CO2 emissions (and prevent Holland, New York and the Maldives from going underwater) we need to act globally. To stop the seas from turning to acid, we need to intervene on a giant scale. To allow our children to breathe clean air that doesn’t poison them down to the very bones, we need massive government intervention.
In America right now (and in good ol’ Blighty, let’s not kid ourselves, we suck muchly), massive government intervention seems to be the heart of a matter that is regarded as somehow evil. As if enforcing laws to prevent the destruction of our forests is akin to Stalin deporting the kulaks; as if the creation of institutions like the NHS, one of the great levellers of society, or the legal obligation to provide a defence lawyer to even the poorest accused in the dock, is somehow retrograde to societal progress. Governments, most of the Republican frontrunners seem to say, don’t know as much about running business – as if the world were a business – as corporations do. Corporations make money and make stuff, and they do this well, and thus they should be given free reign while government intervention should be cut back.
To which the answer is: if this happens, we’re probably all screwed. You; me; everyone. There is no part of the world which will not be touched by climate change. California is becoming a desert. Malarial mosquitoes spread across Europe. Whole seas vanish in Central Asia. Mudslides destroy whole towns where the forests were chopped down; storms grow more fierce and batter our shores; water becomes undrinkable.
To counter all of this – so Klein fluently argues – massive global change is needed, and as a society we need to reclaim not merely our political power, but also our social power in acting as societies as a whole to protect our lives, and this planet. This sounds quite frightening, but one of the redeeming features of the book, is that it paints a reasonably optimistic picture of what life might be like if we do this. Not merely will our children avoid a horrid life in an over-baked world, but the kinds of projects which could help protect the environment, such as civil transport, agricultural change and huge investment in the renewable energy sector, could help fuel an economy in which we measure success not by Having More Stuff Always, but by what we achieve both as individuals and as a culture as a whole, finding our happiness in something that isn’t just the endless production of more cash.
If all of this sounds like a lefty nightmare to you, then perhaps it is. But the very basis of corporations is they exist to make money, and saving humanity from dive-bombing into the fiery furnace is an expensive task that requires the mobilisation of huge resources, and corporations simply won’t hack it. We don’t have to accept that the world is the way it is; we do have to change the way we live, but that doesn’t have to be frightening – it could even be empowering.
The book puts all this better than I can, and as the start of this blog was ‘in praise of’ then let me simply say….
… the world’s in trouble. The first step to fixing these things is facing up to that, learning, thinking and making a choice. You could do a lot worse than start by reading a good book.
