This Changes Everything

“Just Enough Time for Impossible” (Pages 449-458)

Klein recalls a speech at a science conference in San Diego, in 2012, by Brad Werner, titled,“Is Earth F**cked?”.Werner, a complex-systems specialist, had run complex computer models to try and predict the fate of the planet. The computer model made clear that global capitalism was making “earth-human systems dangerous, and his own answer to the question posed in his paper was: ‘more or less’” (449).

But the one point of hope that came from it was what he referred to as the dynamic of resistance:the movement of people who adopt behaviours and values that don’t fit within the dominant cultural model. Klein included environmental direct-action groups amongst these. He argued that history had showed the power of resistance groups to reshape culture, and that these resistance groups represent the likeliest source of friction with our current trajectory towards environmental disaster.

Klein believes it is the social movement that will save us now. We’re on a path to self-destruction and “the only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road” (450-1).

Klein sees in Blockadia and the groups surrounding as a resistance, already working at the choke points to slow fossil-fuel expansion and building positive alternative ways of living.