How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other
How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other
This was the start of modern capitalism. The flood of new mass-produced manufactured products was matched by new markets to buy them. Before, most people had gotten what they needed from local craftspeople and small farms. Now the economy became centered on the market, the overall buying and selling of goods, sometimes items that had been shipped long distances.
One of the main features of this new economic model was—and still is—consumerism. In a market economy, people’s role is to be consumers. Advertisements constantly urge them to buy new goods and replace old ones. Even some political speeches carry the message that it is citizens’ duty to spend and buy.
The Industrial Revolution was not limited to Britain, home of Watt’s steam engine. The revolution spread, first to western Europe and North America. And because it was powered by coal, this spreading revolution also marked the beginning of the human-made changes to the atmosphere that blankets our planet. That is because coal—like oil and natural gas, which came into wide use later—gives off greenhouse gases when it burns, and some of those gases remain in the air for a very long time.
Author Naomi Klein is one of Canada’s most renowned essayists and advocates for change. In How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other, her first book for older children and teenagers, she presents ideas that appeared in many of her adult books: On Fire, This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine and No Is Not Enough. All of these works are cited in the notes for chapters that appear in the end matter. At the core of the new work are two intertwined themes: climate change is destroying our planet, and, since it is causing greater suffering for poorer and minority communities, it is imperative that justice and fairness need to be part of our response to climate change. Klein uses case studies to illustrate her themes and provides ideas on how young people can take actions to promote a more fair and livable future for this and future generations.
Taken together, the two themes may be amongst the most persuasive explanations of the causes of the severe climate change that we face and explanations for why we, as a global society, must embrace huge change in our way of life and reliance on carbon fuels.
As an undergraduate studying geography in the early 1980s, I was introduced to the greenhouse effect and the role it would play in climate change. By the late 1980s, while working with a school board, I was thrilled to see a boom in environmental education. After 1992 and the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, there was some hope that calls to action would be acted upon. Instead, I saw the zeal for environmental or green teaching fade. I wondered why.
Klein posits that 1988 was a turning point when NASA’s James Hansen informed the US Congress that a real warming trend was incontrovertibly related to human activity. However, economic models and neoliberal ideology had a grip on much of the developed world. Deregulation, smaller government and less taxation, and failures of government to prepare for emergencies converged into preventable disasters such as Hurricane Katrina that Klein labels an “unnatural” disaster because the severity of storms is related to climate change and the worst of its effects could have been averted. Our economic systems prioritize corporate interests, and governmental policies value markets and profits over people and the planet. These factors remain stumbling blocks to change.
Two thirds of How to Change Everything describe where we are and how we got here. The final third examines what we can do now to change the path we are on. One chapter discusses the pros and cons of suggested interventions like carbon capture and geoengineering. Local success stories in Puerto Rico and Greensburg, Kansas, are showcased for their implementation of solar voltaic technology, wind turbines and greener buildings.
Klein uses history to teach lessons. The twentieth century saw two examples of massive investments in the economy by government. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal addressed the hardship caused by the Great Depression. He increased minimum wages, installed social security, and regulated banks in order to curb their reckless behavior. At the end of the Second World War, with most of Europe battered from the conflict, the Marshall Plan was introduced. The wartime economy had shown how quickly factories could be retooled to make war products instead of consumer goods, much like factories today switched to making PPE and hand sanitizers during the COVID-19 crisis. On a large scale, people in the UK changed their behaviours, walking, bicycling to work or using public transit so that rationed fuel could be reserved for war efforts. The Marshall Plan invested in rebuilding Europe. Government policies can spur on change, especially when people share goals and determination. What is called for today is a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan. One Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, began a movement that spread around the world in the School Strike for Climate. Movements spur governments to action.
The final chapter, “A Toolkit for Young Activists”, is inevitably disappointing as individuals seem so helpless when confronted with the scale of the problem. Entire first-world lifestyles of consumerism, consumption of large amounts of meat, and heavy reliance upon of carbon fuels need to change. Petitioning schools for more climate change education, boycotting large polluting companies, using social media to try to influence companies, including the banks and insurance companies that invest in fossil fuel infrastructure, are all suggested. Pocketbook power can be as simple as using reusable water bottles and avoiding bottled water products. Getting into nature, becoming environmental activists, and planting trees are easily embraced by youth. Getting political and using the law as some youth have done in partnership with lawyers working pro bono can be a drawn-out process, as cases show, but they are another way to spur on policy changes. Finding a movement to join or starting your own can make a difference. These suggestions may be doable, but time is running out.
Stefoff’s contribution to the book includes authoring many of the profiles of young climate activists that are scattered throughout the book. Other features include black and white photographs, three pages of age-appropriate additional resources, most of which are online, and 10 pages of endnotes, again, mostly online with links that were working as of 29 April 2020. There is no index, and this is very unfortunate as the table of contents is not nearly detailed enough to illuminate the wealth of material covered in the pages. The text is necessarily oriented to a US-readership as that reflects the realities of the marketplace for publishers. The authors manage to take a high road as they strive to focus on issues and possibilities without pointing fingers at one side of the political divide that ensnares the US electorate.
The conclusion to How to Change Everything includes the following summation.
Our house is on fire. It is too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many other species, too. Let’s put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less fancy, but with room for all those who need shelter and care.
Val Ken Lem is the collections lead for the Faculty of Arts at the Ryerson University Library in Toronto, Ontario.