{"id":180782,"date":"2021-03-22T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=180782"},"modified":"2021-03-14T06:27:48","modified_gmt":"2021-03-14T06:27:48","slug":"naomi-klein-we-shouldnt-be-surprised-that-kids-are-radicalised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/03\/naomi-klein-we-shouldnt-be-surprised-that-kids-are-radicalised\/","title":{"rendered":"Naomi Klein: ‘We Shouldn\u2019t Be Surprised That Kids Are Radicalised’"},"content":{"rendered":"

With How to Change Everything, the activist has written her first book for young people. She explains how she has been inspired by a new, very young generation of protesters.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Young activists really bridle against this idea that their job is to give hope to older people\u2019 \u2026 Naomi Klein.
Photograph: Adrienne Grunwald\/the Guardian<\/p><\/div>\n

9 Mar 2021 – <\/em>When Naomi Klein toured North America with her 2019 book about the Green New Deal<\/a>, she and her assistant liaised with local campaigners from the Sunrise Movement. This youthful climate action group was organised to set up a table at each event, with petitions and actions, so audiences could become activists, right there. When they reached Palo Alto, they discovered that the Sunrise Movement contact they\u2019d been \u201cbossing about\u201d was a 13-year-old, who was organising the whole thing between her classes.<\/span><\/p>\n

This shock inspired Klein, who began her activism in her 20s with the anti-corporate bible No Logo, to write her first book specifically for young people. How to Change Everything<\/a> joins a burgeoning library of new books seeking to mobilise a new generation: alongside the iconoclastic Jay Griffiths\u2019<\/a> Why Rebel, and youthful activist Hendrikus van Hensbergen\u2019s How You Can Save the Planet<\/a>, an excellent down-to-earth handbook for teens and pre-teens.<\/p>\n

Klein describes her books as \u201cammo for activists\u201d and she tells her increasingly precocious readers that there are three fires in the world today: climate change, rising anger, fear and anti-immigrant sentiment, and young people. This third fire might save us all. \u201cThe more sparks the fire has, the brighter it will burn,\u201d she writes. \u201cI invite you to add your spark.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all that, How to Change Everything is not incendiary in tone but a calm, detailed exposition of the climate crisis and what we can do about it. Adults will find it a useful primer when our understanding of the importance of climate justice or the shortcomings of carbon capture and storage fails us.<\/p>\n

Given her accumulated wisdom over 25 years of activism, it is tempting to view Klein, 50, as a mother figure for the latest wave. But that might wrongly imply that she is didactic or unwilling to learn from the young. Speaking from her home in British Columbia, Canada, Klein believes that social media makes it \u201cinfinitely harder\u201d for young activists today than when she experienced the \u201cincredibly overwhelming\u201d success of No Logo in 1999.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and this new generation of political leaders, I don\u2019t know how they cope with that amount of input, both positive and negative, and still keep their centre. And they do.\u201d Partly, she thinks, it is because youth leaders \u201chave each other\u2019s backs\u201d. She gives the example of Disha Ravi, the 22-year-old Fridays for Future<\/a> activist in India, who was arrested and charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy<\/a>. \u201cOne of the most amazing things is the way the Fridays for Future movement globally rallied around her,\u201d says Klein. \u201cThey\u2019ve woven this incredible truly international web of children and young adults. Frankly, its internationalism puts the adult climate movement to shame.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2018It\u2019s about the right to a future\u2019 \u2026 Tokata Iron Eyes with Greta Thunberg at a youth panel at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota in 2019.
Photograph: Jim Urquhart\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>

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Klein\u2019s vision of activism was changed by the words of another young activist, Tokata Iron Eyes<\/a>, who was only 13 when they first met at Standing Rock in Dakota. \u201cI feel like I have my future back,\u201d Tokata said when her Sioux community won its first battle against an oil pipeline threatening their water supply.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is what people are fighting for \u2013 their right to a future,\u201d says Klein. \u201cAnd it\u2019s such a deep right. That\u2019s realigned a lot of the writing that I do. It\u2019s about the right to a future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Klein and everyone else with a 1960s, 70s or 80s childhood, was raised with a terror of nuclear war. Many people \u2013 including Klein\u2019s family \u2013 protested against future-ending nuclear weapons. Are today\u2019s youthful fears any different? US college students who were drafted for the Vietnam war felt their immediate future was in jeopardy too, says Klein, but she thinks that today\u2019s young feel profoundly \u201cunprotected\u201d \u2013 not because of accidents or mistakes, but by the normal functioning of the political and economic system: \u201cI grew up with nuclear fear where something could go wrong, somebody could push a button, and we would be in peril. Whereas with the climate crisis, it\u2019s the system literally just continuing to do business as usual that brings us to collapse. The system itself is a failure. The system itself needs to change. And that is what is radicalising.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another young person who is radicalising Klein is her eight-year-old son, Toma. \u201cHe\u2019s changed me in lots of ways,\u201d she says. \u201cHe challenges our consumption. We call him the garbage police, because he hovers over to make sure that nothing is being wasted. And he got us composting at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four years ago, Klein took Toma on a work trip to Australia and a diversion to experience the wonder of the Great Barrier Reef. Their visit coincided with a bleaching event<\/a>, a mass coral die-off caused by global heating. \u201cI felt a mixture of joy and heartbreak,\u201d wrote Klein, \u201cbecause I knew that just as he was discovering the beauty of our world, it was draining away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Klein kept this brutal reality from her son but couldn\u2019t shield him from the climate crisis more recently. Last autumn, Toma\u2019s school reopened in the midst of the Covid pandemic when the area was smogged with wildfires. \u201cAnd so the teachers faced this impossible dilemma: do we keep the windows open to keep air circulating because of Covid? Or do we close the windows to protect the kids with asthma from the wildfires? For kids on their first day of school, that\u2019s what the adults around them were talking about. We shouldn\u2019t be surprised that they\u2019re radicalised.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some parents worry about how to explain global environmental crises to young children; one guide suggests that planetary ills should not be taught to under-10s. My seven and nine-year-olds are moved to desperate tears by today\u2019s more hard-hitting David Attenborough<\/a> documentaries, and Klein admits she withholds these from her son.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn an ideal world, we would wait till 10,\u201d says Klein. \u201cThe reality is, sometimes we just can\u2019t protect them, because climate change is real and it\u2019s affecting our communities.\u201d With Toma, she\u2019s tried to talk about pollution on a scale that he can understand: \u201cWe lay down principles \u2013 that our actions have consequences. And I mostly see my role as giving him opportunities to connect to the natural world, so that he knows what he\u2019s fighting to protect, and whatever he is able to do comes from a place of love, and not only fear.\u201d She\u2019s also taken him on a (successful) local action, to stop a gas-fired power station. \u201cI try to protect him from hopelessness. We have to give them a sense that they can affect this world, or we will lose them to nihilism and despair,\u201d she says. But she also recognises it is \u201cprivileged\u201d to be protective. \u201cMany people on this planet don\u2019t have that option because they\u2019re so directly impacted. Think about how many little kids have been forced to migrate because of hurricanes battering their homelands in Central America.\u201d<\/p>\n