No Is Not Enough

by Naomi Klein

  And this teaching needs to happen fast, she said—climate disruption is kicking in. If non-Indigenous people don’t start to learn how to take care of earth’s life-sustaining systems, then we are all cooked. With this in mind, Brave Bull Allard saw the camps as just the beginning. After the pipeline was defeated, she said, the Standing Rock Sioux needed to turn themselves into a model for green energy and sustainable living.

  This vision of a movement not just resisting but modeling and teaching the way forward is shared by many of the movement’s key figures, including Standing Rock Sioux tribal council member Cody Two Bears. Dressed in a red sweatshirt with the word Warrior emblazoned in black letters, he talked about the early days of European presence on these lands, when his ancestors educated the visitors on how to survive in a harsh and unfamiliar climate. “We taught them how to grow food, keep warm, build longhouses.” But the taking never ended, from the earth and from Indigenous people. And now, Two Bears says, “things are getting worse. So the first people of this land have to teach this country how to live again. By going green, by going renewable, by using the blessings the Creator has given us: the sun and the wind. We are going to start in Native country. And we’re going to show the rest of the country how to live.”

  Age of the Protectors

  At Standing Rock, I found myself thinking a lot about what it means to be a protector. Leaders of the movement here had insisted from day one that they were not “protesters” out to make trouble, but “water protectors” determined to stop a whole other order of trouble. And then there were all the vets in t-shirts that said To Serve and Protect, deciding that living up to that oath meant putting themselves on the front line to protect the rights of the continent’s First Peoples. And I thought about my own duty to be a protector—of my son, and his friends, and the kids yet to come, in the face of the rocky future we’ve locked in for all of them.

  The role of the protector, in the wrong hands, can be lethal. In moments of crisis, strong men step into it with far too much ease, announcing themselves ready to protect the flock from all evil, asking only absolute power and blind obedience in return. Yet the spirit of protection that infused the camp had nothing in common with that all-powerful patriarchal figure. Here was a protection born of intimate knowledge of human frailty, and it was not the one-way, passive kind of protection that can go so very wrong. This protection was reciprocal and it blurred all separation: the water, land, and air protect and sustain all of us—the very least we can do is protect them (or is it us?) when they (or is it we?) are threatened. When the people here faced off against armored tanks and riot police, chanting Mni Wiconi, they were giving voice to that core principle: protect the water, because water protects all of us.

  The same sense of vulnerability and reciprocity guided the veterans’ presence as well. On December 5, the Obama administration announced it had denied the permit to lay the pipeline under the tribe’s water reservoir. That evening, a “forgiveness ceremony” was held on the reservation. For hours, hundreds of vets lined up to beg forgiveness of the elders for crimes committed against Indigenous peoples over centuries by the military institutions they served.

  Wesley Clark Jr., one of the main organizers of the veterans’ delegation to Standing Rock, began by saying:

  Many of us, me particularly, are from the units that have hurt you over the many years. We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted the faces of our presidents onto your sacred mountain. Then we took still more land and then we took your children and then we tried…to eliminate your language that God gave you, and the Creator gave you. We didn’t respect you, we polluted your Earth, we’ve hurt you in so many ways but we have come to say that we are sorry.

  A Path through Anger

  Amidst the tears and the sage smoke, we felt the touch of history. And something else too: a way to deal with rage and grief that went beyond venting. So soon after such a divisive, crude election, it came as a tremendous relief. For weeks, the screens that occupy too much of my life had been engulfed in that unrelenting rage, and in angry circular debates about who, or what, was the one and only true cause of the mess we were now in. Trump won because of the racism of America—end of discussion, some said. No he didn’t, it was the elitism of the corporate Dems—Bernie would have fixed everything, others roared. No, he won because of capitalism, the issue above all others—racism and white supremacy are a sideshow. No, identity politics is what destroyed us, you whiners and dividers. No, it was misogyny, you bunch of flaming assholes. No, it was the fossil fuel industry, determined to suck out their last mega-profits, regardless of how much they destabilize the earth. Plenty of good points were made, but it was striking that the goal was rarely to change minds, or find common ground. The goal was to win the argument.

  And then, within minutes, all that venom dried up. Those battles suddenly made as little sense as putting an oil pipeline under this community’s drinking water source—a pipeline that was originally supposed to pass through the majority-white city of Bismarck, where it was widely rejected over concerns about safety. In the camps, surrounded by people who had been fighting the most powerful industries on earth, the idea that there was any kind of competition between these issues dropped away. In Standing Rock, it was just so clear that it was all of it, a single system. It was ecocidal capitalism that was determined to ram that pipeline through the Missouri River—consent and climate change be damned. It was searing racism that made it possible to do in Standing Rock what was deemed impossible in Bismarck, and to treat water protectors as pests to be blasted away with water cannons in frigid weather. Modern capitalism, white supremacy, and fossil fuels were strands of the same braid, inseparable. And they were all woven together here, on this patch of frozen land.

  As the great Anishinaabe writer and organizer Winona LaDuke wrote of the standoff, “This is a moment of extreme corporate rights and extreme racism faced with courage, prayers and resolve.” It’s a battle that knows no borders. All around the world, the people doing the sacred work of protecting fragile ecologies from industrial onslaught are facing dirty wars. According to a report from the human rights watchdog Global Witness, “More than three people were killed a week in 2015 defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries…. Increasingly communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.” About 40 percent of the victims, they estimate, are Indigenous.

  Since the election, I had been longing for some kind of gathering of progressive thinkers and organizers—to strategize, unite, and find a way through the next four years of Trump’s daily barrage, the kind of discussion that had been so abruptly interrupted in Australia on the day/night of the election. I pictured it happening at a university, in big halls. I didn’t expect to find that space at Standing Rock. But that is indeed where I discovered it, in the camps’ combination of reaction and contemplation, and in the constant learning-by-doing modeled by Brave Bull Allard and so many other leaders here.

  At Standing Rock, they did not, in the end, manage to stop the pipeline—at least not yet. In a flagrant betrayal of the treaty and land rights, Trump immediately reversed Obama’s decision and allowed the company—flanked by layers of militarized police—to ram the pipe under Lake Oahe, without the consent of the Standing Rock Sioux. As I write, oil is flowing beneath the community’s drinking water reservoir, and the pipe could burst at any time. That outrage is being challenged in the courts, and extensive pressure is being put on the banks that financed the project. Roughly $80 million (and counting) has been pulled from the banks that have invested in the pipeline.

  But the oil still flows.

  —

  I will never forget the experience of being at the main camp when the news arrived, after the months of resistance, that the Obama administration had finally denied the pipeline permi
t. I happened to be standing with Tokata Iron Eyes, a fiercely grounded yet playful thirteen-year-old from Standing Rock who had helped kick-start the movement against the pipeline. I turned on my phone video and asked her how she felt about the breaking news. “Like I have my future back,” she replied, and then she burst into tears. I did too.

  Thanks to Trump, Tokata has again lost that sense of safety. And yet his action cannot and does not erase the profound learning that took place during all those months on the land. The modeling of a form of resistance that, with one hand, said no to an imminent threat and, with the other, worked tirelessly to build the yes that is the world we want and need.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A TIME TO LEAP

  BECAUSE SMALL STEPS WON’T CUT IT

  “We can’t keep asking our members to sacrifice. They are losing so much. They need those pipeline jobs—we have to offer them something.”

  The man making this plea was an executive of a major trade union, with many members in Canada’s oil and gas sector.

  Sitting in a large circle, sixty people listened and shifted in their chairs. What he was saying was undeniable. Everyone has a right to a decent job. And energy workers are hurting badly.

  But the people in the room knew too that the case for even one more pipeline was not a matter of bargaining with environmentalists; it was a doomed attempt to bargain with science and chemistry. It is impossible to both keep building new fossil fuel infrastructure and have a chance of keeping temperatures at anything like safe levels.

  That’s when Arthur Manuel took the floor. A highly respected Indigenous intellectual and former chief from the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, Manuel leaned forward, looked the union leader in the eye, and spoke just above a whisper. “Do you think you are the only people who have had to sacrifice? Do you know how much money, how many jobs, my people have turned down from oil and gas and mining companies? Tens of millions of dollars.

  “We do it because there are things that are more important than money.”

  It felt as if the whole room was holding its breath. It was one of several wrenchingly honest exchanges that happened over the course of a two-day gathering in Toronto in May 2015. In the room were leaders and organizers from Haida Gwaii on the west coast to Halifax on the east coast, representing movements across a huge spectrum of issues and identities.

  We had come together to figure out what connects the crises facing us, and to try to chart a holistic vision for the future that would overcome many of the overlapping challenges at the same time. Just as in Standing Rock, more and more people are starting to see and speak about these connections—pointing out, for instance, that the economic interests pushing hardest for war, at home and abroad, are the very same forces most responsible for warming the planet. And that the economic precariousness that the union representative was speaking about, and the attacks on Indigenous land rights and on the earth itself that were referenced by Arthur Manuel (who died suddenly at the start of 2017), also flow from the same place: a corrosive values system that places profit above the well-being of people and the planet. The same system has allowed the pursuit of money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats could seize control of the White House.

  The connections between so many of the emergencies that compete for our time and care are clear. Glaring, even. And yet, for so many reasons—pressure from funders, a desire for “clickable” campaigns, a fear of seeming too radical and therefore doomed—many of us have learned to sever those natural connections, and work in terms of walled-off “issues” or silos. Anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change. Climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. Too seldom within the environmental movement are connections made between the guns that take Black lives on the streets of cities such as Ferguson and Ottawa and the rising seas and devastating droughts destroying the homelands of Black and brown people around the world. Rarely are the dots connected between the powerful men who think they have the right to use and abuse women’s bodies and the widespread notion that humans have the right to do the same thing to the earth.

  So many of the crises we are facing are symptoms of the same underlying sickness: a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable. We came together out of a belief that the persistence of these disconnections, of this siloed thinking, is why progressives are losing ground on virtually every front, left fighting for scraps when we all know that our historical moment demands transformative change. These divisions and compa­rtmen­taliz­atio­ns—the hesitancy to identify the systems we are up against—are robbing us of our full potential, and have trained too many to believe that lasting solutions will always be out of reach.

  We also came together out of a belief that overcoming those divisions—finding and strengthening the threads that run through our various issues and movements—is our most pressing task. That out of those connections would emerge a larger and more fired-up progressive coalition than we have seen in decades, one capable of taking on not only the symptoms of a failed system, but maybe even the system itself. Our goal, and it wasn’t modest, was to try to map not just the world we don’t want but the one we want instead.

  The diversity in the room led to plenty of tough exchanges. But with long, painful histories of failed collaborations and too much broken trust, tough is what happens when people finally decide to make space to dream together. You’d think imagining the world we want would be fun and easy. In fact, it’s the hardest work of all. It also happens to be our only hope. As we have seen, Trump and his cohorts are intent on pushing the world backward on every front, all at once. Only a competing vision that is pushing us forward on multiple fronts has a chance against a force like that. Our experiment in mapping these intersectional agendas began in Canada, but it’s part of an international conversation—in the US, the UK, Australia, across Europe, and beyond—in which more and more people are arriving at the same conclusion: it’s time to unite around a common agenda that can directly battle the political poison spreading through our countries. No is not enough—it’s time for some big, bold yeses to rally around.

  Time for a People’s Shock

  Ever since the 2008 financial meltdown, I have been puzzling over the question of what it would take to pull off a truly progressive populist response to the crises we face.

  I had thought, at one point, that the factual revelations of climate science—if we truly understood them—might be the catalyst. After all, there couldn’t be a clearer indication that our current system is failing: if business as usual is allowed to continue, ever-larger expanses of our planet will cease to be hospitable to human life. And as we’ve seen, responding effectively to climate change requires throwing out the entire pro-corporate economic playbook—which is one of the main reasons so many right-wing ideologues are determined to deny its reality. So it seemed to me that, just as the aftermath of the Great Crash and World War II became periods of massive social transformation, so could the climate crisis—an existential threat for humanity—become an opportunity for once-in-a-century social and economic change.

  The urgency of the climate crisis also gives us something that can be very helpful for getting big things done: a firm, unyielding science-based deadline. We are, it bears repeating, out of time. We’ve been kicking the can down the road for so many decades that we are just plain out of road. Which means if we want a shot at avoiding catastrophic warming, we need to start a grand economic and political transition right now.

  And yet, as we all know, climate change doesn’t play out like a market collapse or a war. With the exception of increasingly common monster storms, it’s slow and grinding, making the warming dangerously easy to push away into our subconscious, behind more obvious daily emergencies. Which is why what brought us together for that meeting in the spring of 2015 wasn’t only the climate crisis, but something that was grabbing front-page headlines: the collapse
in oil prices, which has been such a problem for ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, and Vladimir Putin. For us in Canada—where governments had bet the farm on the expensive tarry oil in Alberta—the sudden drop in price was proving a devastating economic blow. Investors started fleeing from the tar sands, tens of thousands of workers were losing their jobs, and there was no Plan B—whether for creating jobs or raising government revenues.

  For years, Canadians had been hearing that we had to choose between a healthy environment and a robust economy—now it turned out we had neither. Huge swaths of Alberta had been logged and contaminated to get at that heavy oil, Indigenous land rights had been grossly betrayed, and the economy was tanking anyway. Indeed, it was tanking precisely because we had pinned so much on a commodity whose price was on a roller coaster ride nobody seemed able to control.

  Which was why a few of us had started discussing the idea of a national meeting, wondering if perhaps the oil price collapse, combined with the urgency of the climate crisis, might provide the catalyst for the deep transformation our society and economy needs on so many fronts. We began imagining that we could seize this juncture of overlapping crises to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create large numbers of well-paying, low-carbon jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up. This would be the inverse of the shock doctrine. It would be a People’s Shock, a blow from below.