This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein

Description

This book by Canadian activist Naomi Klein covers the climate catastrophy, what needs to be done to halt the worst effects of it, and investigates past activism and how that has stopped or slowed the trajectory of dangerous, extractive action.

Overview

This book covers the destructive activities of Extraction Kids (oil, gas, POS, etc.) and how they are fucking up the world we all have to live in to line their own pocket. Me, being well-versed in ecological topics, approach this topic with a sense of doomerism and negativity, as anyone familiar with the topic probably does. However, I found this book to be written with a sense of hope, which would normally help allieviate some of the deep-seeded pessimism that I tend to approach this topic with. Unfortnantly, it was written that way, but that’s not what I felt when reading it.

This is because this book was written in 2014 and I read it in 2025. This book makes clear what needs to be done in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change and allow the Earth to heal, but unfortunantly, we as humans decided to go in the opposite direction. 2014 was probably the last time I would have felt hope around this; the keystone pipeline had been defeated, there seemed to be a growing consciousness around the climate, I had hope Bernie Sanders could be president, and science and knowledge was something we aspired to instead of belittling it.

Now the orange cunt is in charge, with his philosophy of “drill, baby, drill”, strange tirades against clean energy, withdrawl from the Paris Climate Agreement, and laying waste to the Inflation Reduction Act, widely regarded to be the single most important climate legislation in the history of the United States. What a sad, pathetic piece of shit. I could go on for hours about all the ways this treasonous conman fucked our country and the world, but my blood is already boiling and this isn’t a review of him. Needless to say, all the hope for the future this book offered was destroyed before I ever got to read it.

Really good bits

The part I enjoyed most about this book was the detailed look at *Canadian* indiginous activism. I didn’t know too much about Canada’s history (other than that they broadly have more respect for their indiginous populations than does the United States), so hearing specifically about their fights, and the ways that we can both draw inspiration from and, with everyone else on Earth, benefiet from their actions, is and will always be very powerful. It makes me want to get more active in this scene instead of giving up, which tends to be my default reaction to getting overwhelmed.

The ending of the book was also moving in a way that I did not expect. Klein talked about her struggles to conceive and compared the human body’s tolerance and resilience to that of the Earth and drew parallels between the two. I’m not a mother and tend to have distain towards humans in general, but I really thought this was a powerful way to end the book.

Standout quotation

“Even before I saw the giant mines, when the landscape out the window was still bright green boggy marshes and lush boreal forest, I could feel them - a catch in the back of my throat. Then, up and over a small elevation, there they were: the notorious Alberta tar sands, a parched, gray desert stretching to the horizon. Mountains of waste so large workers joke that they have their own weather systems. Tailing ponds so vast that they are visible from space. The second largest dam in the world, built to contain that toxic water. The Earth, skinned alive.

Science fiction is rife with fantasies of terraforming - humans traveling to lifeless planets and engineering them into earth-like habitats. The Canadian tar sands are the opposite - terra-deforming. Taking a habitable ecosystem, filled with life, and engineering it into a moonscape where almost nothing can live.”

More

Her husband directed a documentary the following year based on the book. I learned about it when searching for the cover of the book for this post. I’ll have to find and watch it.