Climate Action Week: This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein | Capitalism vs The Climate

In This Changes Everything, her first new book in seven years, Naomi Klein, author of the global #1 bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.

Climate change, Klein argues, is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It’s about changing the world. We have been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight for the next economy and against reckless extraction is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring.

Klein will speak about the book followed by a discussion with special guests about the call to engage fundamentally with the issue of climate change. A booksigning will follow the event.

Special Guests:

Clayton Thomas-Muller, organizer, facilitator, public speaker and writer on environmental justice and indigenous rights

Estela Vasquez, Executive Vice President SEIU Local 1199

Michael Leon Guerrero, Climate Justice Alliance

Esperanza Martinez, Acción Ecológica

The New School demonstrates our commitment to climate action and our solidarity with people converging on New York City for the historic People’s Climate March on September 21 with a week-long series of events focused on climate change. As a leader and official endorser of the March, The New School’s Climate Action Week includes a diverse set of programming directed towards the university and wider community for enriched learning and engagement opportunities, scholarship, innovation and creativity, solidarity and collective action, and highlighting New School’s values around climate justice and action.

Location: John L. Tishman Auditorium, University Center
Thursday, September 18, 2014 at 6:00 pm

[rosecoeur]

I can hear her determination and her way of screaming for new helpers for this project . that someone we call "a grande dame" in France ... she is great 

[daneiladams]

Mother Earth will shake us off, I'm not worried...

[thekeytothearabicquran]

We messed up the earth.
Creatures Revolt Against Humans

[chiparoo]

Interesting comments here ... RESPECTFULLY

[wlhgmk]

There is one necessary (although not sufficient) measure that must be taken if we are to succeed with any of the measures Naomi so rightly says is necessary.  PPCT (who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune).  As long as our politicians are financed by the rich, big business, wall street, the banks then the politicians will do their bidding. 

[SkyeLght]

What does she mean? How does anyone choose between poverty & pollution?

[eddiemaxblack]

Isn't the economy incompatible with long-term survival??? I mean, the economy stresses the need for production and consumption of, well, stuff. Or does Naomi Klein have a different take on what an economy means?
Again, an economy requires production.... How are we able to endlessly produce stuff???

[mitcharmstrong]

A sane society understands the relationship between spontaneity and regulation. Every human being is confronted with this dilemma of being. How much is too much? And is there even such a thing as "too much". A ridiculous question, obviously, but some empathically disturbed minds question all certainties which can be known by "objectivizing" it; taking away the lived embodied experience and the needs we have to become better.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, our mental health is contingent on understanding our intrinsic need for inter-subjective connection with others. This is what empathy embodies: a mind that is resonating with another mind. And for whatever reason, most of us feel this "need to be known" - to be reflected upon and to engage other minds, like yourself, experiencing the same surreal reality of existing and yet having the capacity to know that we know; to be a part and yet to transcend it in some ineffable way .

Right now we live in a period of human history where most people are "unbalanced" - in terms of cognitive-affective patterns that entrain them to a perspective of the world that is hostile and negative to the "relational other"; some part of them is highly cynical, sarcastic, and mean. Ultimately it's about the self-system that evolution equipped human conscious functioning with; the self dissociates negative hedonic states from experience, thereby 'preserving" the continuity of self experience (as it is known and affectively experienced by the subjective mind). Shame and any negative affect - many and normal in a state of ignorance - proliferates and we end up with what Riane Eisler calls a "dominance" society. Dominance because being aggressive and using what seems to be an "advantage" to you is utterly instinctive; damn right conducive to getting what you want. And its totally implicit to how we see things. Lakoff and Johnson showed that how we think (cognition) is largely metaphoric, a conceptual representation of an immediate sense impression that is structurally consistent. This maniests, for example, in heightism: people prefer, at some basic level, taller people. Cognitive psychologists call this the "verticality bias", probably formed early on in life when we learn, via very physical affect impressions, that the "big people" i.e adults, are "powerful". Besides the physiological fact, were learned to be this way by these early life affect relations. Result? You have people unconsciously preferring height. CEOs in a competitive/domination construct are mostly very tall: better to project power. And power, indeed, is what they consciously try to project (they feel the metaphoric power of their height). Short people conversely feel all the time the discriminations that are made: that are so powerfully implied, by the basic metaphoric sensation that "small" is "weak" and someway inferior.

But this is it. Naomi Klein is offering a very intelligent and very enticing vision for creating a different world. She's right about dynamics; her emphasis of systems theory enunciates the need for a society that has controls; a "break" that can serve to regulate and control the inherent CHAOTIC interactions within a free market society.

Moreover, and more important, human interactions and relationships can only be intelligently comprehended from the whole perspective. We are each a mirror of the other. Each of us are created in the magical act of relationship; when we observe, just observe, no self actually exists. But when we relate and exist in the flow, we feel a self forming; we feel ourselves becoming "who we are"; some connecting between body and psychic creations. A self forms and becomes a center for our psychic narrative of living.

Capitalism denies this perspective. It goes completely against it; within capitalism, the individual is seen as primary even though his construction occurs through interactions with OUTSIDE effects: the environment "chooses" who we become, at least in the beginning of our lives. This is important to emphasize because fundamentally our interactions with one another are logistically contingent on a whole system perspective. So to have an "ideology" that denies this social fact should, I think, be treated as a denial of a scientific reality.

Its only a regulated economy that will first of all make the necessary investments into education that will help us transform the youth into mindful, responsible and spiritually conscious adults. A healthy and conscious upbringing, an encouragement in a childs imagination; his facility for play; and using these to bridge and and expand his or her mind. I'm personally involved in the mindfulness in schools movement; but I'm also interested stressing the essential social nature of the human mind. Climate change of course is horrible; but I think whats more fundamental for us to learn is the reality that all things are non-linear. The ecosystem, human interactions; they're all bound to a context with simultaneous inputs; in communication, for example, theres the split between explicit content (the thing being said) and the implicit affective information (non-verbal cues, facial expression, gesture, eyes, etc) And its these implicit affects which ultimately determine the course of our explicit narrative - our thinking. So in human interaction, in earths climate and ecosystem, something "emergent" regulates something  below it. Social consciousness and what occurs to us in the act of relating is "emergent" and thus more primary than our own individual psyches. It is this which needs to be taught and promoted: people need to have a deeper understanding of the mechanics of their mind.

We could, actually, do this. I think the penetration of eastern ideas into the west helped sanitize, truly, how we understand human experience.

[JB-szwy]

  What she does not seem to get to is that its not only capitalism that one can blame for the global warming issue. It is true that capitalism can facilitate certain forms of greed and wasteful behavior although this is known to occur in every system and it is a global issue. Population worldwide is a factor and unsustainable use of resources occours in many countries, not only America. For instance, communist Russia (when it was) and likewise China were not environmentally friendly and these had and still do have industries that are not regulated. Moreover, such governments would likely never change their ways and policies. Look at how much industry the Soviet Union was behind and especially what China is today and all the environmentally unsound cheap stuff they produce in order to try to boost their nations productivity and rise in this world. Moreover, countries like Africa have locales and governments that practice environmentally unsustainable practices. Look at Madagascar for instance. This island has been facing deforestation to the threat of the local habitat of its unique animal population (the lemurs) for one and a number of other species. It is a number of locales and government officials there who are all right with clearing this land for agribusiness, and are in fact doing it for their own productivity and use, and a significant number of people there think this a way to boost the standard of living and the economy of the place, or they see little that is not sound with the idea. American researchers in geographical, environmental and bio-sciences noticed this on their travels there.  So let us know when China and Malaysia decide to stop producing plastic toys and disposable goods - its on the rise although factories there have been producing that for a while. And where do some of these silly toys and loom bands originate from or are produced - its not actually here in North America

    

[rhysperegrine]

Her book starts well, but then goes into some cod-philosophy hippy bullshit about how the Natives used to live in harmony with their underpants.
Humanity needs to go forward, not backward.

[footprintsgigi]

To much uhm uhm hm from Naohmi !!
Uhm uhm uhm !!!