Page 53 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

36 N. KLEIN AND C. WRIGHT

is there also has to be contraction at the same time because we need to be
lowering our emissions.
So people who get carried away with the green growth idea, they know
how to add but they’re not so good at the subtraction part and I quote
Kevin Anderson who is a really important climate scientist and emission
reduction specialist at the Tyndall Centre, he’s the deputy director and
used to be director. I quote him a lot in the book and this quote isn’t in the
book because he said it since the book came out but he said you have to
make a distinction between going more slowly down the wrong road and
getting on the right road. A lot of this green growth stuff is about going
more slowly down the wrong road.
CW: In the latter half of your book you focus on social movements
that are emerging in response to the climate crisis particularly the
phenomenon you term ‘Blockadia’. For me this was quite an opti-
mistic message. Who are the natural leaders of the climate justice
movement and how do we make sure their voices are heard, given that
many are acting at a very grass roots level?

NK: The people who are leading this movement are the people who are
most directly impacted by extraction and other forms of fossil fuel infras-
tructure whether it is pipelines crossing their lands or coal export terminals
impacting their fishing grounds. So overwhelmingly it’s people who still
live off the land which means that they’re overwhelmingly indigenous
people or farmers and fishing people. They are building this movement
with incredible speed and I think what’s exciting is the intersection of this
place based movement that is really driven by love of place.
One of my favourite quotes from the book is from a woman named
Alexis Bonogofsky who is a goat rancher in Montana and she says this is
what the coal companies will never understand, that our movement isn’t
driven by hatred of them. It’s not driven by hatred of the coal companies,
it’s driven by love, love will save this place. I think that just from everything
I’ve seen that is absolutely the driving force. It’s love of land, love of one’s
kids and a duty to protect for future generations a different relationship to
the land that is non-extractive.
It isn’t even about stewardship in the sense of just taking care of the land
so that it takes care of us. It’s more about an ethos of caring for the land
and caring for one another.
I mean the exciting part is that intersection between these very local
struggles and technologies that allow these different various front lines of