This is yet another vitally important excerpt from Naomi Klein's latest book. I am especially moved to share this today in light of the wildfires burning out of control miles from our home, the ending of DACA, and yet another catastrophic category 5 hurricane that is predicted to bring life-threatening wind, storm surge, and rainfall hazards to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Cuba, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, the Dominic Republic, Haiti, and Florida. It is crucial that we all work to connect the dots between these events and the other crises which we and our planet are faced with. We need to learn what we do not know and share what we are learning because we are all connected and all in this together. And because the children of today and the future are counting on us here, now, today to act on their behalf. It is time to Leap! I also have to do something with my breaking heart. So, among other things, I offer this... Bless us all — Molly
A Time To Leap
Because Small Steps Won't Cut It
"We can't keep asking our members to sacrifice. They are losing so much. They need those pipeline jobs — we have to offer them something."
The man making this plea was an executive of a major trade union, with many members in Canada's oil and gas sector.
Sitting in a large circle, sixty people listened and shifted in their chairs. What he was saying was undeniable. Everyone has a right to a decent job. And energy workers are hurting badly.
But the people in the room knew too that the case for even one more pipeline was not a matter of bargaining with science and chemistry. It is impossible to both keep building new fossil fuel infrastructure and have a chance of keeping temperatures at anything like safe levels.
That's when Arthur Manuel took the floor. A highly respected Indigenous intellectual and former chief from the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, Manuel leaned forward, looked the union leader in the eye, and spoke just above a whisper. "Do you think you are the only people who have had to sacrifice? Do you know how much money, how many jobs, my people have turned down from oil and gas and mining companies? Tens of millions of dollars.
"We do it because there are things that are more important than money."
It felt as if the whole room was holding its breath. It was one of several wrenchingly honest exchanges that happened over the course of a two-day gathering in Toronto in May 2015. In the room were leaders and organizers from Haida Gwaii on the west coast to Halifax on the east coast, representing movements across a huge spectrum of issues and identities.
We had come together to figure out what connects the crises facing us, and to try to chart a holistic vision for the future that would overcome may of the overlapping challenges at the same time. Just as in Standing Rock, more and more people are starting to see and speak about these connections — pointing out, for instance, that the economic interests pushing hardest for war, at home and abroad, are the very same forces most responsible for warming the planet. And that the economic precariousness that the union representative was speaking about, and the attacks on Indigenous land rights and on the heart itself that were referenced by Arthur Manuel (who died suddenly at the start of 2017), also flow from the same place: a corrosive values system that places profit above the well-being of people and the planet. The same system has allowed the pursuit of money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of scandal-plagues plutocrats could seize control of the White House.
The connections between so may of the emergencies that compete for our time and care are clear. Glaring, even. And yet, for so many reasons — pressure from funders, a desire for "clickable" campaigns, a fear of seeming too radical and therefore doomed — many of us have learned to sever those natural connections, and work in terms of walled-off "issues" or silos. Anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change. Climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. Too seldom within the environmental movement are connections made between the guns that take Black lives on the streets of cities such as Ferguson and Ottawa and the rising seas and devastating droughts destroying the homelands of Black and brown people around the world. Rarely are the dots connected between the powerful men who think they have the right to use and abuse women's bodies and the widespread notion that humans have the right to do the same thing to the earth.
So many of the crises we are facing are symptoms of the same underlying sickness: a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable. We came together out of a belief that the persistence of these disconnections, of this siloed thinking, is why progressives are losing ground on virtually every front, left fighting for scraps when we all know that our historical moment demands transformative change. These divisions and compartmentalizations — the hesitancy to identify the systems we are up against — are robbing us of our full potential, and have trained too many to believe that lasting solutions will always be out of reach.
We also came together out of a belief that overcoming those divisions — finding and strengthening the threads that run through our various issues and movements — is our most pressing task. That out of those connections would emerge a larger and more fired-up progressive coalition than we have seen in decades, one capable of taking on not only the symptoms of a failed system, but maybe even the system itself. Our goal, and it wasn't modest, was to try to map not just the world we don't want but the one we want instead.
The diversity in the room led to plenty of tough exchanges. But with long, painful histories of failed collaborations and too much broken trust, tough is what happens when people finally decide to make space to dream together. You'd think imagining the world we want would be fun and easy. In fact, it's the hardest work of all. It also happens to be our only hope. As we have seen, Trump and his cohorts are intent on pushing the world backward on every front, all at once. Only a completing vision that is pushing us forward on multiple fronts has a chance against a force like that. Our experiment in mapping these intersectional agendas began in Canada, but it's part of an international conversation — in the US, the UK, Australia, across Europe, and beyond — in which more and more people are arriving at the same conclusion: it's time to unite around a common agenda that can directly battle the political poison spreading through our countries. No is not enough — it's time for some big, bold yeses to rally around.
— Naomi Klein
Excerpted from No Is Not Enough
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