The Context Of This Changes Everything, By Naomi Klein

During the lecture on March 22nd, we began to evaluate crisis and reliance in the context of the global climate crisis of today. We based our discussion on the text, This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. The introduction to the book begins with an interesting anecdote that grabs the audience’s attention – in the setting of a commercial plane, the passengers are asked to collect their luggage and exit the plane, as they went down the stairs something unusual caught their attention, someone posted a picture on line explaining their delay, “Why is our flight cancelled? Because DC is so damn hot that our plane sank 4 inches into the pavement.” (Klein, 2)
Here it is, people, the thing the news has been blubbering about for years now, what the
“We engage in this odd form of on and off again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny it because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right” (Klein, 4). Without a doubt our lifestyles must change, the cars we drive, the way we manage our waste, the abundant presence of disposable items. The western market has led us to believe that the more we have the happier we’ll be, but how happy are we going to be when our grandchildren don’t have a world to live on? In the face of this planetary emergency “we must stop telling ourselves comforting stories about how humans are clever and will come up with a technological miracle that will safely suck the carbon out of the skies or magically turn down the heat of the sun” (klein, 3). It is time to come out of denial and use the fear we have been ignoring as the catalyst for change. We must no let this fear paralyze us, it will eat us alive, but rather use it as inspiration for the urgent change mother earth is begging