by Naomi Klein
The tornado was preceded by lightning and a hail of large ice pellets. Then the funnel cloud moved slowly across the town. When it was over, 95 percent of the buildings in Greensburg were destroyed or damaged. Eleven people were dead. Sixty more were injured.
Afterward, about half the town’s 1,500 or so people moved away. Those who remained held meetings in tents to discuss rebuilding their community.
“The number one topic at those tent meetings was talking about who we are—what are our values?… Sometimes we agreed to disagree, but we were still civil to each other,” said Bob Dixson, Greensburg’s mayor at the time. Like many other people who lived in the rural area, Dixson had roots in a long line of farmers. He added, “Let’s not forget that our ancestors were stewards of the land. My ancestors lived in the original green homes: sod houses…. We learned that the only true green and sustainable things in life are how we treat each other.”
So Greensburg decided to reinvent itself as an environmentally friendly green town. With the help of government disaster-relief grants, nonprofit organizations, and a local business that built a big wind turbine, Greensburg became a model of sustainable living.
Its new public buildings meet the high standards of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system, a program that certifies the environmental friendliness of buildings. The LEED rating system measures features such as whether a building is placed on a site in the best way for the local environment, whether it uses energy and water efficiently, and whether it is made from sustainable materials that are produced or harvested without destroying limited resources. Half a dozen of Greenburg’s structures, including the community’s new hospital and school, have LEED’s highest-level platinum certification.
Students were part of this planning process. They had ideas about their new school, and they did not hesitate to share them. One of the architects who worked with the town on the rebuilding said, “If not for the outspoken input of the youth, the school would be an ordinary regional school located ten miles from town on a site the school board purchased within a week of the storm. But because the next generation saw a need for change and had the desire to stand up for it, the school is now an anchor for the community sited along Main Street, both transforming education and adding vitality to the community.”
Clean, renewable energy powers the town. Most of it comes from wind. The force of nature that nearly ended Greensburg now turns large and small turbines that power businesses, public buildings, and farms.
This bold reinvention has benefited the town in several ways. One benefit is the money its renewable energy sources have saved. The hospital spends 59 percent less on energy than a typical hospital of its size, and the school saves 72 percent. Another benefit is that the town is likely to fare better if another tornado comes along. Houses and apartments are being built using methods, such as having straw bales in their walls, that not only save energy but may strengthen those structures against high winds.
Although Greensburg’s population remains smaller than before the tornado, the little town’s influence is big. The story of Greensburg’s greening has been told in books, articles, two documentary miniseries, and the halls of Congress. Planners from other parts of the country, as well as young people learning about environmentally sustainable living, come to the town to see how it’s done.
The Big Well in Greensburg, Kansas, called “the world’s largest hand-dug well,” is 109 feet (33 meters) deep. It survived the 2007 tornado that nearly wiped out the town, but the museum around it was destroyed. Today the rebuilt museum—whose new staircase echoes the tornado’s spiral shape—chronicles Greensburg’s rebirth as a green town.
Greensburg showed the power of shared decision-making at the community level. It showed that people who suffered a terrible loss had the courage to start over in a new way that looks toward the future. Another lesson from Greensburg is the power and efficiency of thinking big. If individuals had rebuilt their homes and businesses with energy-efficient windows and appliances, those changes would have been good. But by thinking on a bigger scale and imagining a whole new kind of town, the people of Greensburg were able to get the support and funding needed to make a much bigger difference in the fight against climate change.
What if there was a way to help many towns and cities become more like Greensburg, but without waiting for disasters to smash them first? What if we had a plan to take the lessons of Casa Pueblo nationwide, or worldwide?
Read on—there is a way.
CHAPTER 8 A Green New Deal
The world’s climate scientists have told us what we must do in order to bring the warming of our planet under control. We’ll have to change almost everything about how we get energy, use resources, and live. Does a change that big sound impossible?
It isn’t. We’ve done it before, more than once. And we did it at times when the nation and the world were in crisis, just as the world is in a climate and economic crisis today.
THE ORIGINAL NEW DEAL
A sweeping change happened in the United States during the 1930s. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the country launched dozens of programs that changed government and the economy. Together these programs were called the New Deal.
The background to the New Deal was an economic catastrophe called the Great Depression. In the United States, it started in October 1929. The flow of money from investors on the stock exchange had driven prices of many stocks—which are shares of ownership in corporations and financial funds—to high values. Investments of this type can create economic instability because they are always subject to cycles of rising and falling. This time, people panicked at reports that stocks were overpriced and due to lose value. Nervous investors happened to sell a huge number of shares in just one week. The value of shares dropped suddenly and dramatically, sending shock waves through the economy.
Banks failed. Businesses closed. Millions of people lost their jobs. Most of those who still had jobs suffered sharp cuts in pay. Government felt the pinch too, because its income from taxes quickly went down. As international trade weakened and then collapsed, the economic depression spread to other countries.
Never had the United States known such widespread poverty, suffering, and hunger. Shantytowns sprang up. People who could no longer pay rent or find work made what shelters they could out of scrap wood, old cloth, and cardboard. They roamed the nation’s cities, towns, and countryside, looking for work or begging for food. Black Americans were hardest hit. They were the first to lose their jobs, and they were unemployed at higher rates than whites.
At first, the government did little to help. No federal programs existed to provide a social safety net that could support unemployed people or those who were elderly or disabled.
But after Roosevelt became president in 1933, he promised to offer Americans a “new deal.” To combat the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression, his administration launched a flurry of new policies, programs, and public investments. Minimum wage laws were introduced to protect workers from being grossly underpaid. Social Security was created to give older people a source of income after their working lives and to help people who were disabled and could not work.
Because a major cause of the Great Depression was reckless behavior by banks that had used their customers’ money to make risky investments in stocks, or to lend money to companies in which bank officials owned stocks, an important piece of the New Deal was new regulations to keep banks from such behavior in the future. An Emergency Banking Act allowed banks to reopen, but under federal oversight. These strict federal regulations were understood to be necessary for the overall health of the economy—just as scientists now urge strict regulation of greenhouse gas emissions for the overall health of the planet.
Other New Deal programs brought electricity to most of rural America for the first time and built a wave of low-cost housing in cities. In the center of the country, where drought had turned vast stretches of farmland into a Dust
Bowl, agricultural aid focused on protecting soil. These programs helped the country recover from the Depression by creating jobs and protecting people’s livelihoods.
One way the New Deal attacked unemployment was with a program called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This organization was created to provide work for young men, including older teens. Volunteers had to sign up for at least six months. They were fed, housed in work camp dormitories, and paid a small monthly salary—most of which they were supposed to send home to help support their families. Thousands of them were taught to read and write, or acquired new job skills, during their time in the CCC.
Young men clean up at the “wash room” of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in California’s Eastern Sierra range in 1933. The CCC was part of the New Deal that lifted America out of the Great Depression.
In exchange for these benefits, the volunteers worked on public projects, mostly outdoors and in the West. The benefits to the environment were extensive. Volunteers planted more than 2.3 billion trees during the life of the CCC. They built or improved roads, bridges, flood-control levees and dams, and other structures. Many projects were located in America’s national and state parks, including the eight hundred new parks the CCC helped to create. Large numbers of these structures can still be seen today.
At its peak in 1935, the CCC had half a million volunteers in twenty-nine hundred camps. As many as three million American men passed through the CCC during the nine years of the program. African American men could take part, but the camps were segregated by race. Women could not join, except at one camp, where they learned canning and other household tasks.
Other New Deal programs left a lasting legacy across the United States. The Works Progress Administration employed people to build schools, roads, airports, and more.
In all, more than thirty new agencies were created between 1933 and 1940, and the government directly employed more than ten million people.
The biggest shortcoming of the New Deal was that it overwhelmingly favored white, male workers. Women, Black people, Mexican Americans, and Indigenous Peoples benefited less. Still, the New Deal showed that a society can make huge changes within just ten years. The New Deal expressed a shift in values. The focus moved from wealth and profits at all costs to helping others and rebuilding a more secure economy and society.
Along with the shift in values came swift changes in government responsibilities and federal spending. To cope with an urgent crisis, the government acted quickly and brought about a big transformation. When people today say that there isn’t enough money to pay for the changes needed to fight climate change, or that a government or an economy can’t move that fast, the New Deal reminds us that there is, and it can.
During the New Deal, not everything was paid for by the federal government with taxpayers’ dollars. Roosevelt’s administration created insurance and loan programs that encouraged banks and individuals to invest in the economy. A mix of government and private money paid for the New Deal, which pulled millions of families out of poverty. The same thing can happen today—and without the New Deal’s racial and gender exclusions—if we decide to change everything.
Young People in the New Deal
“I live in real terror when I think we may be losing this generation,” said Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934. “We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.”
The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt that her husband’s New Deal was not doing enough for young people. Many young men and women could not find work. Others could not afford to stay in college. Together with educators, Eleanor Roosevelt pushed for a program especially for them.
The result was the National Youth Administration (NYA), created in 1935. The NYA granted money to high school and college students in exchange for part-time work. This let the students stay in school without borrowing money or leaving school to seek jobs. For example, one young man in Idaho taught classes at the local YMCA in exchange for an NYA grant that allowed him to stay in school at a junior college.
For young people who were not in school but could not find jobs, the NYA offered on-the-job training in federal work programs. It later changed its focus to teaching job skills such as sewing and auto repair to young people.
After the United States entered World War II, young men and women learned skills related to national defense. The NYA trained girls to operate X-ray machines in hospitals, to use machine tools such as drills in an aircraft manufacturing plant, and to assemble radios.
The makers of the original New Deal created the NYA because they saw that they could not ignore young people. As with today’s young people, they refused to be overlooked. Your generation will be part of whatever changes we make to tackle the problems of climate change and injustice. And just as the young people of the New Deal found a way to use their skills or learned new ones, you’ll see in the next chapter that the skills you already have, or new skills you gain, can be a valuable part of your activism.
A MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE EARTH
The New Deal was not the only time in modern history when people met drastic challenges with rapid, large-scale action. During World War II (1939–1945), Western nations changed their industries overnight to fight Hitler’s Germany. Factories that had made consumer products such as washing machines and cars switched with astonishing speed to making ships, planes, and weapons.
People changed their lifestyles, too. To free up fuel for the military, they stopped or reduced their driving. In Britain, there was virtually no driving for anything that wasn’t truly necessary. North Americans also drove much less. Between 1938 and 1944, use of public transit such as buses and trains went up by 95 percent in Canada and went up by 87 percent in the United States.
People grew their own food in their yards or community plots to free up agricultural crops for the military. In 1943, twenty million American households had “victory gardens.” This meant that three-fifths of the nation’s population were growing fresh vegetables.
Then, when the war ended, western and southern Europe were left in a ravaged state. Economies were ruined. So were many cities and landscapes.
US Secretary of State George C. Marshall convinced Congress that the United States should help rebuild the nations of Europe—including Germany, the chief enemy during the war. He argued that there would be long-term benefits to the United States and to capitalism. A recovering Europe would provide a growing market for US products.
In April 1948, Congress agreed to what came to be called the Marshall Plan. Spending for the plan eventually totaled more than $12 billion, the largest aid program in the country’s history to that point. Aid began with shipments of food, fuel, and medical supplies. The next stage was investment in rebuilding power plants, factories, schools, and railways.
The Marshall Plan did much to put European factories, businesses, schools, and social programs back on their feet. And, as Marshall had predicted, by lifting up the stricken nations of Europe, the United States helped itself, too. It forged stronger trade and political ties to those nations, which were ready to engage in international commerce much sooner than they would have been without the Marshall Plan.
Today, with the climate crisis upon us, some people have called for a global or green Marshall Plan for the world. One of the first to talk about it was Angélica Navarro Llanos.
I met Navarro Llanos in 2009. At the time she was representing the South American nation of Bolivia at international meetings. She had just made a speech to a United Nations climate conference, in which she said:
Millions of people in small islands, least-developed countries, landlocked countries as well as vulnerable communities in Brazil, India and China, and all around the world—are suffering from the effects of a problem to which they did not contribute…. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth… to ensure we reduce emissions while raising people’s quality of life.
A Marshall Plan for the Eart
h could be a way for the wealthier, longer-industrialized nations to pay their climate debt to the rest of the world, as discussed in chapter 3. In addition to transforming their own economies by shifting away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, those wealthier nations could provide resources for the rest of the world to do the same thing. This could also pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty and provide people with services, such as electricity and clean water, that they now lack.
If we are to prepare the world to face and fight climate change, we must start by calling a halt to new coal mines, offshore rigs for drilling oil, and fracking new fields of oil and gas. But beyond that, we have to cut down and eventually halt our use of the mines, drilling rigs, and fracking fields that already exist. At the same time, while we reduce our use of fossil fuels—and also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from other activities such as industrial agriculture—we have to rapidly increase our use of renewable energy and ecological farming methods, so that we can get our global carbon emissions down to zero by the middle of this century.
The good news is that we can do all of this with the tools and technology we already have. More good news: we can create hundreds of millions of good jobs around the world as we move from an economy based on fossil fuels to an economy without carbon emissions. Jobs would open up in many kinds of work:
designing, making, and installing renewable energy technology such as solar panels and wind turbines
building and operating public transit such as high-speed electric trains, to provide good alternatives to much driving and flying