by Naomi Klein
Another example. The Leap explicitly acknowledges the role that our government’s foreign policies have played, and continue to play, in pushing people to leave their homes and seek asylum in other countries. Some are pushed by the dire economic impacts of trade deals that our government supported, some by mines that our companies have built. Some are pushed by wars that our government helped wage or fund.
All these—the trade deals, the wars, the mines—are major contributors to the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, and now climate change itself is also forcing people to leave their homes. Which is why we decided to reframe migrant rights as a climate justice issue. We clearly stated that we need to open our borders to many more migrants and refugees, and that all workers, regardless of immigration status, should have full labor rights and protections. We need to do this not out of charity or as an expression of the goodness in our hearts, but because climate change, in its global complexity, teaches us that our fates are, and always have been, interconnected. Underneath it all, this is about what kind of people we want to be as the impacts of our collective action become undeniable. It’s a moral and spiritual question as much as an economic and political one.
We knew that the greatest obstacle our platform would face was the force of austerity logic—the message we have all received, over decades, that governments are perpetually broke, so why even bother dreaming of a genuinely equitable society? With this in mind, we worked closely with a team of economists to come up with a parallel document that showed exactly how we would raise the revenues to pay for our plan.
Before releasing the platform to the public, we approached many organizations and high-profile individuals. Again and again, we heard: Yes. This is who we want to be. Let’s push our politicians. Canadian caution be damned. National icons stood with us without hesitation: Neil Young. Leonard Cohen. The novelist Yann Martel wrote back that it should be “shouted from the rooftops.” This was a rare document that could be signed by Greenpeace, the head of the Canadian Labour Congress, and Indigenous elders like the famed Haida spokesperson and master carver Gujaaw. More than two hundred organizations in all.
THE BACKLASH
Given this initial enthusiasm, we were frankly a little surprised by what happened when we launched the platform into the wider world. “Shit storm” would be an understatement.
First, our former prime minister Brian Mulroney came out of retirement to declare the Leap “a new philosophy of economic nihilism” that “must be resisted and defeated.” Then, after the NDP voted to endorse its spirit and debate its specifics, the sitting premiers of three provinces, from three different political parties, came out to denounce it. “Hundreds of towns would be wiped off the map. Tomorrow. And turned into ghost towns,” one said. “An existential threat,” said another. And finally, from the (now former) NDP Premier of Alberta: “A betrayal.”
Interestingly, none of this seems to have had much of an impact at the grassroots. People keep adding their names to the platform. They keep starting local Leap chapters. And a poll conducted at the peak of the backlash found that a majority of Green, NDP, and Liberal voters supported the core ideas in the Leap Manifesto. Even 20 percent of Conservatives. I think this reveals a pretty interesting divide: A whole lot of people of different political persuasions read the Leap and thought it sounded eminently sensible, inspiring even. But our elites across party lines agreed that it sounded like the end of the world.
So, what can we make of that chasm? It was really just one line in the Leap that caused most of the uproar, the one that said that we can’t build any more fossil fuel “infrastructure that locks us into increased extraction decades into the future.” The “no pipelines” line.
Let’s unpack that a little. From a scientific perspective, it’s not at all controversial. In Paris, governments negotiated a climate treaty that pledged to keep warming below 2°C while pursuing “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.” (It was Justin Trudeau’s team that fought to get that more ambitious language in there.)
To put that in perspective, we have already warmed the planet by roughly 1°C from where we were before humans starting burning coal on an industrial scale. So, if 1.5–2°C is our goal, then that puts us on a very constrained carbon budget. Staying within it—and scientists have been very clear on this—requires that we leave a whole lot of our current carbon reserves in the ground. For particularly dirty forms of fossil fuel, like Alberta’s bitumen, it means about 85–90 percent of it has to stay in the ground. This is peer-reviewed research that has been published in the journal Nature and elsewhere; it’s not contested.
Same goes for opening up new fossil fuel frontiers with technologies like fracking. And our politicians don’t dispute it. They admit that their current emission-reduction targets—and this is true not just for Canada—take us way beyond the temperature goals they set in Paris. They do not add up to a carbon budget of 1.5–2°C. They add up to warming of 3–4°C—and that’s if we manage to meet those targets. A big if.
We can have a debate about whether it is worth doing the very difficult things necessary to keep from warming the planet by 3–4°C (which, by the way, climate scientists have said is incompatible with anything you could describe as organized civilization). It would be an interesting debate to have. But that is not the debate we are having. Instead, when people argue for climate policies that are guided by science and by our own government’s very publicly stated goals, they are basically told to shut up and stop destroying the country.
A UNIQUELY CONSTRICTED DEBATE
This is not true everywhere. Other countries are moving ahead with some of the policies that actually reflect scientific realities. Germany and France have both banned fracking, for instance. They both have a long way to go to bring their emissions in line with Paris Agreement temperature targets, but the aversion to talking about leaving carbon in the ground is not nearly as powerful in Europe as it is here. And we can’t just blame this on the fact that we have a big oil and gas sector with lots of jobs on the line. Other countries do as well, and they are much farther along than us. Even the United Arab Emirates, a straight-up petrostate, is preparing for the end of oil, funneling tens of billions in oil wealth into new investments in renewables.
It’s not just Canada that can’t seem to have a rational debate about ecological limits. The debate is equally unhinged in Australia and the United States, with large segments of the political and pundit class denying the science outright—and the more this happens, the more the rest of the world is held back. I’ve been puzzling over what accounts for these geographic discrepancies. And I think it comes back to where we started: those official national narratives that tell countries what values define them, and the kind of power structures that these narratives nurture and maintain.
THE STORY OF ENDLESSNESS
When we launched the Leap, we hit up against a narrative that runs extremely deep, one that predates the founding of young countries like ours. It begins with the arrival of European explorers, at a time when their home nations had slammed into hard ecological limits: great forests gone, big game hunted to extinction.
It was in this context that the so-called New World was imagined as a sort of spare continent, to use for parts. (They didn’t call it New France and New England by accident.)
And what parts! Here seemed to be a bottomless treasure trove—of fish, fowl, fur, giant trees, and, later, metals and fossil fuels. In North America and, later, in Australia, these riches covered territories so vast that it was impossible to fathom their boundaries. We were the place of endlessness—and whenever we began to run low, our governments just moved the frontier west.
The very existence of these lands appeared to come as a divine sign: Forget ecological boundaries. Thanks to this body-double continent, there seemed to be no way to exhaust nature’s bounty. Looking back at early European accounts of what would become Canada, it becomes clear that explorers and early settlers truly believed that th
eir scarcity fears were gone for good. The waters off the coast of Newfoundland were so full of fish that they “stayed the passage” of John Cabot’s ships. For Quebec’s Father Charlevoix in 1720, “The number of [cod] seems equal to that of the grains of sand that cover the bank.” And then there were the great auks. The feathers of the penguin-like bird were coveted for mattresses, and on rocky islands, particularly off Newfoundland, they were found in huge numbers. As Jacques Cartier put it in 1534, there were islands “as full of birds as any field or meadow is of grasse.”
Again and again, the words inexhaustible and infinite were used to describe the Eastern forests of great pines, the giant cedars of the Pacific Northwest, all manner of fish. Another common refrain is that the natural bounty is so great, there is really no point in worrying about managing this treasure trove to prevent depletion. There was so much that there was a glorious freedom to be careless. Thomas Huxley (the English biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog”) told the 1883 International Fisheries Exhibition that “the cod fishery . . . are inexhaustible; that is to say nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish. Any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently . . . to be useless.”
That’s a lot of famous last words, given what we now know. Given that by 1800 the great auks were completely wiped out. Given that beaver stocks began to crash in Eastern Canada soon after. Given that Newfoundland’s supposedly inexhaustible cod was declared “commercially extinct” in 1992. As for our inexhaustible old-growth forests: virtually wiped out here in Southern Ontario. More than 91 percent of the biggest and best stands on Vancouver Island, gone.
Of course, a great deal of this is not unique to Canada. The early US economy was brutally extractive, too.III But there were some key differences. The southern slave economy was based on the extraction of forced human labor, used to clear and cultivate land to feed the rapidly industrializing North. Though slavery did exist in Canada, our primary role in the transatlantic slave trade was as a supplier: Much of that supposedly endless cod was salted and shipped to the British West Indies (Jamaica, Barbados, British Guiana, Trinidad, Grenada, Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Saint Lucia). For wealthy plantation owners, cod was an invaluable source of cheap protein for enslaved Africans.
Our economic niche was always voraciously devouring wilderness—both animals and plants. Canada was an extractive company, the Hudson’s Bay fur trading company, before it was a country. And that has shaped us in ways we have yet to begin to confront. But it does go some way toward explaining why it caused such an uproar when a group of us got together and said: Actually, we have hit the hard limits of what the earth can take; we have to leave resources in the ground, even when they are still profitable. The time for a new story, and a new economic model, is now.
Because such enormous fortunes have been built in North America purely on the extraction of wild animals, intact forest, interred metals, and fossil fuels, our economic elites have grown accustomed to seeing the natural world as their God-given larder. What we discovered with the Leap is that when someone or something (like climate science) comes along and challenges that claim, it doesn’t feel like a difficult truth. It feels, as we learned, like an existential attack.
The economic historian Harold Innis (who never reckoned with Canada’s crucial role in the slave trade) warned of this almost a century ago. Canada’s extreme dependence on exporting raw natural resources, he argued, stunted our country’s development at “the staples phase.” This is true for large parts of the US economy as well—Louisiana and Texas for oil, West Virginia for coal. This reliance on raw resources makes economies intensely vulnerable to monopolies and to outside economic shocks. It’s why the term banana republic is not considered a compliment.
Though Canada doesn’t think of itself like that, and some regions have diversified, our economic history tells another story. Over the centuries, we have careened from bonanzas to busts. In the late 1800s, the beaver trade collapsed when European elites suddenly lost their taste for top hats made of pelts and moved on to smoother silk. Last year, the economy of Alberta went into free fall because of a sudden drop in the price of oil. We used to get yanked around by the whims of British aristocrats; now it’s Saudi princes. I’m not sure that counts as progress.
The trouble isn’t just the commodity roller coaster. It’s that the stakes grow larger with each boom-bust cycle. The frenzy for cod crashed a species; the frenzy for tar sands oil and fracked gas is helping to crash the planet.
And yet despite these enormous stakes, we can’t seem to stop. The dependence on commodities continues to shape the body politic of settler-colonial states like Canada, the United States, and Australia. And in all three countries, it will continue to confound attempts to heal relations with First Nations. That’s because the basic power dynamic—our countries relying on the wealth embedded in their land—remains unchanged. For instance, when the fur trade was the backbone of wealth production in the northern parts of this continent, Indigenous culture and relationships to the land became a profound threat to the lust for extraction. (Never mind that there would have been no trade without Indigenous hunting and trapping skills.) Which is why attempts to sever those relationships to the land were so systematic. Residential schools were one part of that system. So were the missionaries who traveled with fur traders, preaching a religion that cast Indigenous cosmologies as sinful forms of animism—never mind, once again, that the worldviews they attempted to exterminate have a huge amount to teach us about how to regenerate the natural world, rather than endlessly deplete it.
Today in Canada, we have federal and provincial governments that talk a lot about “truth and reconciliation” for those crimes. But this will remain a cruel joke if nonindigenous Canadians do not confront the “why” behind those human rights abuses. And the why, as the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission report states, is simple enough: “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”
The goal, in other words, was always to remove all barriers to unrestrained resource extraction. This is not ancient history. Across the country, Indigenous land rights remain the single greatest barrier to planet-destabilizing resource extraction, from pipelines to clear-cut logging. We’re still trying to get the land, and what’s underneath. We see it south of the border as well, in the Standing Rock Sioux’s pitched struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This was true two hundred years ago, and it is true today.
When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the “why” behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress.
Only when we have the courage to tell the truth about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.
* * *
I. Despite Donald Trump’s multiple attempts to push through the $8 billion pipeline via executive order, it remained tied up in court challenges as this book went to press.
II. The Leap was, in many ways, a kind of proto-Green New Deal plan, an attempt to link ambitious climate action with a transition to a much fairer and more inclusive economy. The strengths and weaknesses of our experiment may be useful as the Green New Deal model is attempted in different countries.
III. As historian Greg Grandin recently argued in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, the promise of advancing through an ever-expanding open frontier has been the primary way that US politicians have resolved social and ecological conflicts. Whenever the soil was depleted by careless farming, or one group
of poor (white) immigrants demanded greater equality, the response was to violently seize yet more land from Native Americans and expand the sphere. But now the figurative wall has been reached, and there is no more frontier available, whether geographic, financial, or atmospheric. Grandin argues that Donald Trump and his border wall should be understood as a reaction to the crashing of the frontier myth: with no frontier left to conquer, Trump turns his full attention to hoarding US wealth for his chosen group, while locking out everyone else. This is why outmoded national narratives cannot be left to die quietly. They need to be challenged with new stories that reflect how our knowledge has evolved and who we want to be—or else they’ll turn septic and even more dangerous.
HOT TAKE ON A HOT PLANET
Ours is a culture of endless taking, as if there were no end and no consequences. A culture of grabbing and going. And now this grab-and-go culture has reached its logical conclusion. The most powerful nation on earth has elected a grabber in chief.
NOVEMBER 2016
SYDNEY PEACE PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
AS I WAS MAKING NOTES for this lecture over the past couple of weeks, I knew I really should be preparing two versions: the “Hillary wins” version and the “Trump wins” version.
Thing is, I couldn’t quite bring myself to write the “Trump wins” version. My typing fingers went on strike. I knew I would be speaking to you a mere forty-eight hours after learning the US presidential election results, so in retrospect, I was grossly derelict in my duties. And I apologize if what follows seems rushed—it is rushed. A hot take, as they call it these days, on a hot planet.
If there is a single, overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the power of direct appeals to power over “the other”—the migrant, the Muslim, black people, women. Especially during times of economic hardship. Because when large numbers of white men find themselves frightened and insecure, and those men were raised in a social system built on elevating their humanity over all these others’, a lot of them get mad. And there is nothing wrong in itself with being mad—there’s lots to be mad about.