On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  It was a good day. I met some amazing people in the paddy wagon and at the bar afterward. After we were all released, it occurred to me that I might have trouble getting that US passport now. I was fine with it but decided to see what would happen if I tried. Much to my surprise, it worked, and that’s how I finally got a US passport in my forties.

  So, that explains the American part, but it doesn’t explain why my American family came to Canada in the first place. That’s a whole other story, also involving jail. It was 1967, my father was finishing up medical school, and both my parents were active against the war in Vietnam. Like many of his peers, my father did everything he could to avoid the draft: he filed for Conscientious Objector status, he tried to find an alternative form of service, you name it. It didn’t work, and he found himself faced with a choice between going to Vietnam, going to jail, or going to Canada. So . . . here we are.

  On car trips, my parents would regale us kids with stories of their escape, which to us sounded like a high-octane thriller: the letter from the army, the shotgun wedding, the secrecy to keep others from being implicated in their crime. We heard about how they boarded a late-night flight that landed in Montreal at midnight because they had heard that the Francophone anti-American customs agents worked the graveyard shift. Then—phew—they were waved through. Here’s how my father recalls their arrival: “In twenty minutes we were landed immigrants, on the path to Canadian citizenship!”

  Growing up in Canada with American lefty parents gave me a pretty rosy picture of this country. I heard a lot about the reasons they’d left the United States: the militarism, the jingoism, the millions without health insurance. And a lot about the things that drew them to, and kept us in, Canada. Like Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declaring Canada “a refuge from militarism,” universal public health care, public support for media and the arts. (My mother landed a staff job at the National Film Board where she was paid by the government to make subversive feminist documentaries.) In retrospect, it was a tiny bit like growing up in one of those Michael Moore films that show Canada as a utopian, alter-USA, where no one locks their doors, and no one gets shot, and no one waits to see a doctor, and everyone is super nice to each other all the time.

  It wasn’t quite that cartoonish. But there was a lot of stuff missing in the American-filtered stories of Canada that shaped my childhood and my own national pride. I now know, for instance, that while Canadians were feeling righteous about not joining the war in Vietnam and welcoming draft dodgers, Canadian companies were selling weapons and billions in other materials to supply the US war effort, including napalm and Agent Orange. Having it both ways is something of a Canadian military tradition. We did it again in 2003, when Canada very publicly did not participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq because the attack did not have UN approval—and then, far less publicly, supported the subsequent occupation with exchange officers and warships.

  It can be painful to look too closely at the stories that make us feel good, especially when they are part of the intimate narratives that mold our identities. I struggle with this still. I agree with my parents that our health care system and support for public media and the arts are part of what make us different from the United States. But it’s also true that these institutions and traditions are deeply diminished after decades of neglect. These days, my father spends much of his retirement working to defend our public health system against encroaching US-style privatizations.

  There is something else about my happy Canadian story that needs some poking. That frictionless experience at the airport—twenty minutes to landed immigrant status. That very likely had a lot to do with the fact that my parents, like many of the draft dodgers, were white, middle class, and college educated. These were not the only people fleeing war that Canada welcomed in this period; we also received sixty thousand Vietnamese refugees.

  But this window of openness was relatively brief and a response, in part, to our shameful refusal to accept Jewish refugees during the Second World War. In recent decades, black and brown people on the bombardment end of illegal wars, including the wars we have helped fuel with weapons or soldiers or both, most certainly do not get landed immigrant status in twenty minutes, free to start work on Monday morning. Thousands are thrown in jail for years, charged with absolutely no crime. Many are in maximum-security prisons, with no idea when they will be released, a practice that has been repeatedly criticized by the United Nations.

  The stories we tell about who we are as a nation, and the values that define us, are not fixed. They change as facts change. They change as the balance of power in society changes. Which is why regular people, not just governments, need to be active participants in this process of retelling and reimagining our collective stories, symbols, and histories.

  And this is happening, too. For instance, all around Toronto, where we gather, the Ogimaa Mikana Project has been replacing official street signs with their Anishinaabe-language versions. They also put up a billboard near where I live reminding passersby that our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood is the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the land and water. It’s a very public attempt to change the collective story or, more accurately, to lift up older stories that are still alive but are usually drowned out by the barrage of louder, newer messages we receive day in and day out.

  Interrogating the stories we have long taken for granted is healthy, especially the comforting ones. When the narratives and mythologies still feel helpful and true, resolving to do more to live up to them is also healthy. But when they no longer serve us, when they stand in the way of where we need to go, then we need to be willing to let them rest and tell some different stories.

  THE LEAP

  With that in mind, I want to share with you some reflections on one attempt at collective retelling—and how it clashed with some very powerful national narratives at the heart of the global ecological crisis. It’s a project that I have been involved with called the Leap Manifesto. Many of you are aware of it. I know some of you have signed it. But the story behind the Leap is not very well known.II

  The Leap came out of a meeting that was held in Toronto in May of 2015, attended by sixty organizers and theorists, from across the country, representing a cross section of movements: labor, climate, faith, Indigenous, migrant, women, antipoverty, anti-incarceration, food justice, housing rights, transit, and green tech. The catalyst for the gathering was a sudden drop in the price of oil, which had sent shock waves through our economy because of its reliance on revenues from the export of high-priced oil. The focus of our meeting was how we could harness that economic shock, which vividly showed the danger of hanging your fortunes on volatile raw resources, to kick-start a rapid shift to a renewables-based economy. For a long time, we had been told that we had to choose between a healthy environment and a strong economy; when the price of oil collapsed, we ended up with neither. It seemed like a good moment to propose a radically different model.

  At the time that we met, a federal election campaign was just gearing up, and it was already clear that none of the major parties was going to run on a platform of a rapid shift to a post-carbon economy. Both the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP), then vying to unseat the governing Conservatives, were following the playbook that you needed to signal your “seriousness” and pragmatism by picking at least one major new oil pipeline and cheering for it. There were vague promises being offered on climate action but nothing guided by science, and nothing that presented a transition to a green economy as a chance to create hundreds of thousands of good jobs for the people who need them most.

  So, we decided to intervene in the debate and write a kind of people’s platform, the sort of thing we wished we could vote for but that wasn’t yet on offer. And as we sat in a circle for two days and looked each other in the eye, we realized that this was new territory for contemporary social movements. We had all, or most of us, been part of broad coalitions
before, opposing a particularly unpopular politician’s austerity agenda, or coming together to fight against an unwanted trade deal or an illegal war.

  But those were “no” coalitions, and we wanted to try something different: a “yes” coalition. And that meant we needed to create a space to do something we never do, which is dream together about the world that we actually want.

  I am sometimes described as the author of the Leap Manifesto, but that’s not true. My role was to listen, and notice the common themes. One of the clearest themes was the need to move from the national narrative that many of us had grown up with, that was based on a supposedly divine right to endlessly extract from the natural world as if there were no limit and no such thing as a breaking point. What we needed to do, it seemed to us, was set that story aside and tell a different one based on a duty to care: to care for the land, water, air—and to care for one another.

  Largely because of the diversity in the room, we were also conscious that if we wanted a genuinely broad “yes” coalition, we couldn’t fall back on a vision that was nostalgic or backward looking—a prelapsarian yearning for a seventies-era nation that never respected Indigenous sovereignty and that excluded the voices of so many communities of color, that often put too much faith in a centralized state and never actually reckoned with ecological limits.

  So, rather than looking back, we started our platform with where we wanted to end up:

  “We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.”

  The idea was to first paint a clear picture of where we wanted to go, and then get into the nitty-gritty of what it would take to get to that place. But before I get into those details, I want to return to the challenge of official stories.

  You can tell from the name, the Leap, that it is about big and rapid change. That’s why we chose it as our title: Because we know that when it comes to climate change, we have procrastinated for so long and made the problem so much worse that small steps, even if they are in the right direction, are still going to land us in a very deep hole. However, by framing our project as one of transformation, not incrementalism, we also put ourselves in a head-on collision with a story cherished by a lot of powerful interests in this country: that we are a moderate people, steady-as-she-goes kind of folks. In a world of hotheads, we like to tell ourselves that we split the difference, choose the middle path. No sudden movement for us, and certainly no leaping.

  Now, it’s a very nice story, and moderation is an asset in all sorts of circumstances. It’s a good approach to alcohol consumption, for instance, and hot fudge sundaes. The problem, and the reason we chose this very un-moderate title quite consciously, is that when it comes to climate change, incrementalism and moderation are actually a huge problem. Because they will lead us, ironically, to a very extreme, hot, and cruel future. When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.

  This was not always the case. The first intergovernmental meeting to talk about the climate crisis and the need for industrialized nations to lower emissions was held in 1988. Canada hosted it. It took place in this very city, and it came up with some fantastic recommendations. If we had listened to them, if we had all started cutting our emissions three decades ago, we could have taken it nice and slow: chipped away at our carbon footprint, knocked it down a couple of percentage points a year. A very moderate, gradual, centrist type of phaseout.

  We didn’t do that. We—not just our country but virtually every wealthy and fast-developing nation—did not do that. In fact, as governments met year after year to talk about lowering emissions, emissions went up by more than 40 percent. Here in Canada, we opened up huge new fossil fuel frontiers, and developed technology to dig up some of the highest-carbon oil on the planet. We didn’t back off on the drivers of climate disruption; we doubled down. That was not very moderate—it was actually quite extreme.

  So, now the problem is much worse. Worse because emissions have exploded, so we have to cut them far more deeply to bring them to safe levels. And worse because we have no time left, so we need to start these cuts immediately. That’s what happens when you kick the can down the road enough times. You run out of road.

  So, now we really do have to take radical action. Sudden and sweeping action, never mind how profoundly it conflicts with those comforting stories we tell ourselves about our centrist souls. Call it what you want: a Green New Deal, the Great Transition, a Marshall Plan for Planet Earth. But make no mistake: This is not an add-on, one more item on a governmental to-do list; nor is the planet some special interest to satisfy. The kind of transformation that is now required will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational mission, in our country and in every major economy on earth.

  One thing we were very conscious of when we drafted the Leap Manifesto is that emergencies are vulnerable to abuses of power, and progressives are not immune to this by any means. There is a long and painful history of environmentalists, whether implicitly or explicitly, sending the message that “Our cause is so big, and so urgent, and since it encompasses everyone and everything, it should take precedence over everything and everyone else.” Between the lines: “First we’ll save the planet and then we will worry about poverty, police violence, gender discrimination, and racism.”

  In fact, that is a great way to build a very small, weak, and homogenous movement. Because poverty, war, racism, and sexual violence are all existential threats if you and your community are in the crosshairs. So, inspired by the climate justice movement growing around the world, we tried something else. We resolved that if we were going to radically change our economy, to make it a lot cleaner in the face of climate catastrophe, then we had to seize this opportunity to make it a lot fairer at the same time, on all these different fronts. That way nobody was being asked to choose between which existential threat mattered most to them. I’ll give you a few quick examples.

  Unsurprisingly, for a climate-focused document, we called for big investments in green infrastructure: renewables, efficiency, transit, high-speed rail. All of it to get to a 100 percent renewable economy by mid-century and 100 percent renewable energy well before that. We knew that all this would be a huge job creator—investing in these sectors creates six to eight times more jobs than putting that money in oil and gas. So, we called for public money to retrain those workers who face losing their jobs in extractive sectors, so that they are ready to work in the next economy, and the unions around the table told us that it was crucial for workers to be democratically involved in designing those retraining programs. So, that’s all in the platform: basic principles of a justice-based transition.

  But we also wanted something more. When we talk about “green jobs”—and we talk about them a lot—most of us picture a guy in a hard hat putting up a solar array. Sure, that is one kind of green job, and we need lots of them. But there are plenty of other jobs that are already low-carbon. For instance, looking after elderly and sick people doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Teaching kids is low-carbon. Day care is low-carbon. And yet this work, overwhelmingly done by women, tends to be undervalued, underpaid, and is frequently the target of government cutbacks. So, we decided to deliberately extend the usual definition of a green job to anything useful and enriching to our communities that doesn’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. As one participant said, “Nursing is renewable energy. Education is renewable energy.” Moreover, this kind of work makes our communities stronger, more humane, and, therefore, better able to navigate the shocks that are headed our way in a climate-
disrupted future.

  Another key plank in the Leap Manifesto is what is known as “energy democracy,” the idea that renewable energy, whenever possible, should be public- or community-owned and controlled so that the profits and benefits of new industries are far less concentrated than they are with fossil fuels. We were inspired by Germany’s energy transition, which has seen hundreds of cities and towns taking back control over their energy grids from private companies, as well as an explosion of green energy cooperatives, where the profits from power generation stay in the community to pay for essential services.

  But we decided that we need more than energy democracy, that we also need energy justice, even energy reparations. Because the way energy generation and other dirty industries have developed over the past couple of centuries has forced the poorest communities to bear a vastly disproportionate share of the environmental burdens while deriving far too little of the economic benefits. Which is why the Leap states that “Indigenous Peoples and others on the front lines of polluting industrial activity should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects.”

  Some find these kinds of connections daunting. Lowering emissions is hard enough, we are told—why weigh it down by trying to fix so much else at the same time? Our response is that if we are going to repair our relationship to the land by shifting away from endless resource extraction, why wouldn’t we begin to repair our relationships with one another in the process? For a very long time, we have been offered policies that amputate the ecological crises from the economic and social systems that are driving them. That is precisely the model that has failed to yield results. Holistic transformation, on the other hand, has never been tried on a national scale.