Naomi Klein
1) Her Biography and Main Works:
In the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia, Naomi Klein holds a tenured position as the UBC Professor of Climate Justice (Geography Dept). She served as the UBC Centre for Climate Justice’s co-founding director. At Rutgers University, she was appointed to the first Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies in 2018. She teaches media and climate as an honorary professor at Rutgers.
Naomi is a bestselling author of How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Earth and Each Other (2020) and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. She is a syndicated columnist, award-winning journalist, and author of numerous books, these books include This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), No Logo, and No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017). (2000). She reprinted her feature article for The Intercept in The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists (2018), with all revenues going to the Puerto Rican non-profit juntegente.org.
The Intercept’s senior contributing writer is Naomi Klein. The New York Times Syndicate published her regular column, which was written for The Nation, The Globe and Mail, and The Guardian, in major newspapers all over the world. She has worked as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Harper’s. She has written for Rolling Stone from China, The Intercept from Standing Rock and Puerto Rico, The Nation from Copenhagen (COP15), The Financial Times from Buenos Aires, and Harper’s from Iraq. Her writing has also featured in numerous other magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, El Pais, L’Espresso, The New Statesman, and Le Monde.
Naomi has works published in over 35 languages. Fast Company magazine named On Fire the best Climate Book, and it was a New York Times bestseller. No Is Not Enough was a New York Times best-seller and a National Book Award nominee. This Changes Everything made the New York Times bestseller list, was included in the New York Times Book Review’s list of the “100 Notable Books of the Year,” and won the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. It was also nominated for numerous other honours. In 2007, The Shock Doctrine was released on a global scale and was translated into more than 25 languages. The first Warwick Prize for Writing was won by it. It was listed on several “best of the year” lists, including one for New York.
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Naomi Klein’s debut book, has been translated into over 30 languages. It was dubbed “a movement bible” by the New York Times. No Logo’s tenth anniversary edition was released globally in 2009. It was selected by The Literary Review of Canada as one of the top 100 novels ever published in Canada. No Logo was chosen by The Guardian as one of the Top 100 Nonfiction Books of All Time in 2016. No Logo was also selected by Time magazine as one of the Top 100 Non-Fiction Books since 1923. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, a compilation of her writing, was released in 2002.
The Toronto International Film Festival had the world premiere of the feature documentary. This Changes Everything in 2015. It was directed by Avi Lewis and has Naomi as the narrator. The six-minute companion piece to Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning movie The Shock Doctrine premiered in 2007 and was a part of the official programmes of the Toronto, San Sebastian, and Venice film festivals. The feature-length documentary version of The Shock Doctrine debuted in 2010 at the Sundance Film Festival. The Take, a full-length documentary on the factories in occupation in Argentina, was co-written by Naomi Klein and directed by Avi Lewis in 2004. The movie received the Best Documentary Jury Prize at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles and was an Official Selection of the Venice Biennale.
She frequently gives commentary on the media to publications, radio stations, and television networks around the world. She has been on programmes like Democracy Now, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Colbert Report, BBC Newsnight and HARDTalk, and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. She has been profiled and interviewed for hundreds of publications, including magazines, newspapers, and podcasts. The New Yorker magazine gave her a major profile and referred to her as “the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago.” She was selected as one of Prospect magazine’s top 100 public intellectuals, one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Americans Changing America, and one of Ms. Magazine’s Women of the Year.
After the publication of This Changes Everything, Klein concentrated on putting its principles into practise. She was one of the organisers and authors of Canada’s Leap Manifesto, a guide for a swift and just transition away from fossil fuels that received support from over 200 groups and tens of thousands of people and inspired similar climate justice projects all around the world.
She became a co-founder of The Leap, an organisation for climate justice born from the Manifesto that aimed to bring new urgency and daring solutions to the intersectional challenges of our time: racism, inequality, and climate change. She was given the opportunity to speak at the Vatican in 2015 as part of the historic Laudato Si’ eco-encyclical launch by Pope Francis. She spoke at the press conference held in 2018 by New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio to announce the city’s decision to stop investing in fossil fuels.
She holds numerous honorary degrees and accolades. She was selected as one of The Frederick Douglass 200 in 2019, an effort to recognise the influence of 200 living people who most closely represent Douglass’s ideas and spirit. Her engagement in anti-globalization social movements and protests earned her the IPE Outstanding Activist-Scholar Award from the International Studies Association in 2014. Naomi is one of the most influential voices in the campaign to counter globalisation and the author of countless books and essays.
The Izzy (I.F. Stone) Award for Outstanding Independent Media and Journalism was given to Naomi Klein in 2015. According to the award, “Few journalists today take on the great issues as extensively and fearlessly as Naomi Klein.” She creates a package that not only highlights issues but also sheds light on effective activity and solutions. She mixes meticulous reporting, analysis, history, and a global perspective. That holds true for both her ground-breaking book on climate change and her wonderfully connected essays, like the one about the relationship between racial justice and climate justice.
For “exposing the structural causes and responsibility for the climate crisis, for inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally, and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality, and for reminding us of the power of authentic democracy to achieve transformative change and justice,” she received Australia’s international award for peace, the Sydney Peace Prize, in 2016.
2) Main Themes:
Band-Aid solutions don’t work:
“Only large-scale social movements can now save us. Because we are aware of the consequences of maintaining the current system”. What Klein refers to as “Band-Aid remedies”—profit-friendly solutions like cutting-edge technical advancements, cap-and-trade programmes, and purportedly “clean” substitutes like natural gas—are at the centre of much of the discourse surrounding climate change. Such measures, in Klein’s opinion, are too late and too little. She explains how the profitable “solutions” put out by many think tanks (and their corporate patrons) really make the situation worse in her lengthy critique of corporate engagement in climate change mitigation.
For instance, Klein contends that carbon trading programmes generate unfavourable incentives that encourage firms to increase their production of dangerous greenhouse emissions in order to receive payment for reducing them. Carbon trading schemes have aided businesses in making billions in the process, enabling them to directly profit from the deterioration of the environment. Instead, according to Klein, we must abandon the fundamentalist view of the market, embrace long-term planning, tighter company regulation, higher taxes, more expenditure by the government, and stop privatising critical infrastructure.
We need to fix ourselves, not fix the world:
“The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves”. In the book, Klein devotes an entire chapter to geoengineering, a field of study that seeks to combat global warming by altering the earth itself. For example, deserts could be covered in reflective material to reflect sunlight back into space, or the sun could be made to appear dim to lessen the amount of heat reaching the planet.
The proposed scientific experiments on the planet have drawn criticism from governments and a large portion of the global public, and Klein warns of the unknowable repercussions of creating “a Frankenstein’s world” with numerous nations commencing projects at the same time. According to Klein, these “techno-fixes” won’t help to restore environmental balance; rather, they will just serve to further disrupt it, resulting in a never-ending cycle of new issues that need to be “fixed.” The earth, which serves as our life support system, would be put on continuous mechanical support to keep it from turning into a full-fledged monster against us, the author argues.
We can’t rely on “well-intentioned” corporate funding:
“A great many progressives have opted out of the climate change debate in part because they thought that the Big Green groups, flush with philanthropic dollars, had this issue covered. That, it turns out, was a grave mistake”. Klein sharply criticises business alliances with significant environmental organisations as well as efforts by “green billionaires” like Richard Branson of Virgin Group and Bill Gates to use capitalism to combat global warming. Klein contends that it is unreasonable to expect businesses and wealthy individuals to prioritise the environment over their own financial interests when capitalism is a major contributor to climate change. For instance, while funding numerous significant environmental organisations working to prevent climate change, the Gates Foundation had at least $1.2 billion invested in BP and ExxonMobil as of December 2013. Furthermore, once Big Greens are dependent on business finance, they begin to promote corporate policies. For instance, groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy, who have received millions in money from pro-fracking corporate sponsors like Shell, Chevron, and JP Morgan, are promoting natural gas as a cleaner substitute for oil and coal.
We need divestment, and reinvestment:
“The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social licence of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions”. Diversification, according to the carbon divestment movement’s detractors, will have little to no financial impact on polluters. But according to Cameron Fenton, a Canadian activist for divestment, “No one is thinking we’re going to ruin fossil fuel firms,” as quoted by Klein, this line of thinking is misguided.
But we can destroy their reputations and deprive them of their political influence. More significantly, divestment creates opportunity for reinvestment. A few million dollars taken from ExxonMobil or BP frees up funds that can be used to build green infrastructure or provide local communities the tools they need to localise their businesses. Some universities, non-profit organisations, pension funds, and municipalities have already gotten the message. According to Klein, 13 American colleges and universities, 25 North American communities, about 40 places of worship, and several significant foundations have all pledged to divest their endowments of fossil fuel stocks and bonds.
Confronting climate change is an opportunity to address issues:
“When climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not (only) because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention”. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein outlined how businesses have profited from global disasters. She contends that the climate change problem can operate as a wake-up call for widespread democratic action in This Changes Everything. For instance, after a tornado largely damaged Greensburg, Kansas in 2007, the town chose community-based reconstruction over top-down approaches to recovery, increasing democratic engagement and constructing new, ecologically friendly public facilities.
Greensburg is currently one of the greenest cities in the country. According to Klein, this instance shows how people may utilise climate change to unite and create a greener society. Additionally, it can and should lead to a fundamental restructuring of our economy, one that involves less private investment, less foreign trade (which is a component of relocalizing our industries), and more government spending to build the infrastructure required for a green economy. As more redistribution is implied by all of this, more people will be able to live happily on the planet, according to Klein.
3) Criticisms of Capitalism:
According to Klein, neither carbon nor humans are to blame for the impending climate crisis. The issue is a specific configuration of these components, or capitalism, whose main goal is the discovery and exploitation of resources. It’s a pattern of behaviour, or, if you prefer, a mental habit. As a result, it is modifiable. However, because we are “locked in, politically, physically, and culturally” to the society that capitalism has created, we frequently are unable to recognise this. Klein sums up the issue by saying, “We lack the collective spaces in which to confront the raw terror of ecocide.” It’s fortunate for everyone that Klein excels at creating such openings.
She completely changed the terms of the pro-corporate argument and the argument about the purpose of politics in the twenty-first century in a manner that you hardly even noticed. The only way I was able to bring materialism and vanity into a reasonable place in my life was by developing an interest in other things, the activist-intellectual said of her own transformation from shopping junkie to campaigner on why it doesn’t matter whether your shoes were produced in a sweatshop to her “This is a political issue, not a consumer issue. Products are just stuff.” Whether or not you shop is irrelevant since politics is all about the rule of law and democratic institutions. It is the responsibility of the public to find a way to persuade politicians to change if they aren’t acting in accordance with public opinion.
Since the advent of steam, capital, according to Klein, has been insulating people from their surroundings. The World Trade Organization was established in the early 1990s, and with it came a “new era” of hyperactive deregulation, tax reductions, and privatisation of public space. This is what she refers to as “our great collective misfortune,” though. According to Klein, historians will observe the two processes running concurrently and each claiming they are unaware of the other: the corporate globalisation that is “zooming from victory to victory” and the climate movement that is “struggling, sputtering, completely failing.”
If the climate movement wants to have a chance of becoming real, it needs to think more carefully about money. However, because climate change is “place-based” by nature and moves so erratically, it is challenging to detect as it occurs. What am I aware of regarding the Nauruan mines or the Niger Delta gas flares? What can I do to prevent flooding in New Orleans or the Maldives? The locations that are the most decrepit are what Klein chillingly refers to as “sacrifice zones: poor places. remote locations.
Areas where people lack political influence, typically due to a mix of race, language, and class. However, even in wealthy nations, most people are either unaware of the disappearance of nature in their parks and gardens or, if they are, they are so horrified that they must stop observing right away. Because of this, according to Klein, the living wage is a climate issue.
The fundamental factor of why so many individuals are so reckless is that they are exhausted. She adds that in 2009, while having lunch with Bolivian diplomat Angélica Navarro Llanos, she had her own “eureka” moment. Navarro Llanos described how strong international climate action could mobilise what she dubbed “a Marshall Plan for the Earth” using chopsticks as props.
Klein realised for the first time that climate change is not a purely scientific or abstract issue and that it is far too crucial to be left up to the knitters. Her ideas for “a politics based on reconnection” incorporate actual, every day, engaged people who are employed in suitably contemporary, complex cultures. Compared to their counterparts that use fossil fuels, green businesses like public transportation and renewable energy all require significantly more labour. Climate change action is a huge job creator, community builder, and source of hope.
4) The Beauty Myth:
The Beauty Myth’s central thesis is that, as women’s social influence and prominence have grown, so too has the pressure they feel to uphold false social standards of physical beauty due to commercial influences on the media. This pressure impairs women’s capacity to function well in society and be accepted by it by causing undesirable behaviours in them and a fixation on looks in both sexes.
5) Her Influence Today:
Klein is a senior columnist for The Intercept and contributes to The Nation, In These Times, The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. She previously served as a Miliband Fellow and spoke about the anti-globalization movement at the London School of Economics. In October 2018, she was named the first Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Funding for the position comes from individuals, endowments, and foundations. In a 2005 internet poll of the top 100 public thinkers in the world, which was put together by Prospect magazine and Foreign Policy magazine, Klein came in at number 11. She participated in demonstrations against police brutality and force at the 2010 G-20 conference in Toronto. On June 28, 2010, she addressed a gathering in front of the police headquarters calling for the release of demonstrators.
She paid a visit to Occupy Wall Street in October 2011 and delivered a speech in which she referred to the protest movement as “the most important thing in the world.” She and four other panellists, including Michael Moore, William Greider, and Rinku Sen, spoke on a panel regarding the future of Occupy Wall Street on November 10, 2011, during which she emphasised the significance of the developing movement. In 2017, Klein also participated in the British radio programme Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4.
Klein played a significant role in the creation of the Leap Manifesto, a political platform that was released in the run-up to the 2015 Canadian federal election and aimed to address the climate crisis by restructuring the country’s economy and addressing issues of racism, colonialism, and income and wealth inequality. The manifesto is credited with helping shape the Green New Deal and eventually inspiring the founding of The Leap, an organisation that strives to further the application of the original manifesto’s guiding ideas.
In a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in November 2019, Klein joined other well-known individuals in calling him “a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world” and endorsing him for the 2019 UK general election. She accepted a three-year position at Rutgers University as the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies from 2018 to 2021.
