Before I began work as a researcher for author Naomi Klein on her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, I suppose I was like most people who preferred not to think about the end of the world. I had assumed the good guys were on it. You know, the United Nations and the green NGOs with their big splashy polar bear campaigns. Right?
Not so much. Our team, under Klein’s fine direction, unearthed a lot of dirt on the “good guys.” We found out that slick corporate-backed NGOs were often actively worsening the situation. We exposed so-called climate heroes who were, well, not: Former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, for example, was zealously investing in oil and gas while also championing climate change action in his hometown. (This year, after he was appointed Special Envoy for Climate Action by the United Nations Secretary-General, Bloomberg complained about grassroots activists protesting an elite climate summit in California.)
Today, after a People’s Climate March, a Paris Agreement, and a Trump victory, this knowledge is no less depressing. But I also learned that, as Klein would argue in the book, it’s our economic system, not individuals, that drives climate change as it incentivizes unending exploitation. It’s also what renders many responses to climate change inadequate.
Unfortunately, the most recent story on climate change you’re likely to have read points the finger at something else. In his epic piece, “Losing Earth,” New York Times Magazine journalist Nathaniel Rich argues that it is neither the fossil fuel industry (the richest on Earth) nor the climate-denying Republicans in its pocket, but “human nature” that “has brought us to this place.” Many, including Klein, have already pointed out the problems with this view, which inevitably glosses over many powerful responses to climate change by communities across the globe.
Because, as it turns out, there are good guys under capitalism. They’re just the ones actively subverting it—pushing to transform our economic system and adapt to climate change in ways that bring power to the people. We highlighted many of these stories in This Changes Everything, including Canada’s indigenous Idle No More movement. And we’re highlighting them here in The Progressive, too, in a crop of features on urgent, underreported efforts to make a new world.
Broad global action is our urgent priority, yes, but so are thousands of small and not-so-small-scale responses to the reality before us.
In these pages, Houston native Renée Feltz follows her reporting for Democracy Now! in post-Hurricane Harvey Texas, with a piece on the pushback against Hurricane Alley’s plastic future. Stephanie Hoo follows South Asians in the United States who are holding their adopted country accountable. Mrill Ingram explores the work of artists attempting to draw our attention to an alien planet right here on Earth: the ocean. Author Douglas Haynes revisits the Nicaragua that he documented in his climate book, Every Day We Live Is the Future. In partnership with Scalawag magazine, Katherine Webb-Hehn introduces us to Louisiana fishermen working to restore their fast-disappearing coast. My piece visits a Wisconsin village that pioneered a form of climate change adaptation now underway across the country.
We are ecstatic to have writer and activist Bill McKibben contribute our lead editorial. He also weighs in on climate ambition alongside other movement leaders on page 32. There are excerpts from new books by Bernie Sanders and After Coal filmmaker Tom Hansell. Photographer Ayşe Gürsöz documents indigenous peoples disrupting that exclusive California climate summit.
We’ve also got a Q&A with climate journalist Dahr Jamail, and my longer interview with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who is working to establish a climate-resilient Puerto Rico in which residents are trained for transformation.
None of these offerings, of course, is meant to present a silver bullet fix. But if I learned anything researching This Changes Everything, it’s that silver bullets are as dangerous as they are shiny. Broad global action is our urgent priority, yes, but so are thousands of small and not-so-small-scale responses to the reality before us.
I was born in 1988, the year both Klein and Nathaniel Rich mark as a turning point in the climate battle. It was the year physicist James Hansen brought climate change to the public consciousness with his historic Senate testimony. “The exact year,” Klein wrote, “that marked the dawning of ‘globalization.’ ” Now, exactly thirty years and my entire lifetime later, the stories in this issue show us a fuller picture of our situation. Not by blaming human nature for the end of the world, but in illuminating the many ways we humans are saving it.