This Changes Everything

“Moving from Extraction to Renewal” (Pages 419-424)

Klein tells, on a personal level, of how she lost the ability to enjoy nature for a time, because of the shadow of the ecological crisis it was under. She describes this as “pre-grief,” a sense of coming loss and how being involved in the international environmentalist movement has brought fresh hope.

She tells of her personal experience trying to get pregnant, which coincided with the five years writing and researching this book. After a miscarriage and surgery, she tried IVF, but came to a point where she felt she had to give that option up. 

She describes how her experiences of IVF and trying and failing to get pregnant and the researching and writing of this book started to interact in her mind.

Klein explains how talk about saving the world for “our children” and the notion of “Mother Earth” was emotionally difficult for her at that time. Where did it leave someone who was struggling to, or could not, have children? How could she relate to “mother earth”?

Her view changed when she drew a connection and saw that mother earth was actually facing a great many fertility challenges of her own, with industrialisation interfering with systems at the heart of the earth’s fertility cycle.