Naomi Klein

Quotes

1. In order for multinational corporations to protect their freedom to pollute the atmosphere, peasants, farmers, and Indigenous people are losing their freedom to live and sustain themselves in peace. p. 222

2. 

   To understand how we got to this place of profound disconnection from our surroundings and one another, and to think about how we might build a politics based on reconnection, we will need to go back a good deal further than 1988. …

3. 

   The strongest challenges to this worldview have always come from outside its logic, in those historical junctures when the extractive project clashes directly with a different, older way of relating to the earth—and that older way fights back. p. 177

4. 

   Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill … p. 294-95

5. 

   The kind of counter-power that has a chance of changing society on anything close to the scale required is still missing.… most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ blackened England’s skies …. And yet when demonstrators are protesting the various failures of this system [throughout the world], climate change is too often little more than a footnote when it could be the coup de grâce." p. 156-57

6. 

   This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. p. 36-37

7. 

   But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may sell see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out. p. 178

8. 

   I always tell people that the most important thing they can do is join groups of other people taking action. And that action depends on where they can have the most influence. If they’re university students, that may mean divestment. If they live somewhere in the path of a pipeline, it may mean stopping that pipeline. If they’re a brilliant economist, it may mean working with colleagues on policy approaches that movements can champion.

9. 

   … I have been repeatedly struck by how the hard-won lessons about humility before nature that have reshaped modern science, particularly the fields of chaos and complexity theory, do not appear to have penetrated this particular bubble. p. 267

10. 

    But before that can happen, it’s clear that a core battle of ideas must be fought about the right of citizens to democratically determine what kind of economy they need. Policies that simply try to harness the power of the market—by minimally taxing or capping carbon and then getting out of the way—won’t be enough. p. 125

11. 

    If guilt set in, well, we could click on the handy carbon calculators on any one of dozens of green sites and purchase an offset, and our sins would instantly be erased.

12. 

    There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation. p. 252