Naomi Klein discusses upcoming climate justice film on Democracy Now

For many of today’s climate justice activists, Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything serves as a handbook for the revolution. It paints a terrifying picture of what will happen if we don’t do anything, but a diverse (and notably indigenous and female) picture of what’s already being done to fight the fossil fuel industry and climate change. 

The book has a notably feminist bent to it. As Maya wrote in her review of it, the mass social movement Klein argues is required to address climate change,

…looks a lot like the kind of intersectional, anti-capitalist feminism I believe in. A feminism that goes beyond the mainstream second-wave request for the mere equality of women in the current social, political, and economic order and instead calls for a radically new one. A feminism that draws on the tradition of the “wages for housework” movement that aimed to show that women’s unpaid work in the home is, as Klein says, “a massive unacknowledged market subsidy” and demands an economic system that properly values “the work that makes all other work possible.” A feminism that really takes to heart the reproductive justice movement’s wisdom that true reproductive freedom requires more than just a legal “right to choose” — it requires new social conditions to make it a real choice. A feminism that adopts indigenous feminism’s commitment to “questioning the nation-state” and imagining new forms of sovereignty “predicated on interrelatedness and responsibility,” as Andrea Smith urges us.

What’s exciting is that Klein’s powerful feminist approach to climate justice won’t end with her book. She and her partner Avi Lewis have recently released a film that was made to accompany the book, and this week they were on Democracy Now to discuss it. In the segment, they talk about the work that went into the film, some of the movements covered within it, and the struggle for climate justice in relation to today’s news. Klein calls out today’s world leaders, demanding that they do better: “I think from Obama we’ve seen what it looks like [to lead] as if your legacy depends on it. But we need to see leadership as if the world depended on it.”

When asked about Shell’s announcement that it will stop what she calls its “$7 billion adventure” drilling in the Arctic, Klein emphasizes the tireless activism that helped bring about Shell’s decision, noting that “the fossil fuel industry will go to great lenths not to credit activism as being a contributor to a decision like this.”

Be sure to watch the whole segment here and part two here, and find out where you can see This Changes Everything!