Last month more than seven million people across 185 countries participated in the Global Climate Strike. Days earlier, environmental journalist and activist Naomi Klein had released her latest book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, which opens with a similar event: the school climate strikes held in March 2019, which saw more than 1.6 million young people take to the streets to fight for their future.
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Both events were inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose already significant international profile grew after her address to the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit at which the 16-year-old chastised world leaders over their inaction on climate change.
Klein opens On Fire by exploring the global youth movement and Thunberg's role in inspiring a generation of youth climate activists.
"Listening to Thunberg speak about how our collective climate inaction had nearly stolen her will to live seemed to help others feel the fire of survival in their own bellies," she writes.
On Fire assembles articles, essays and speeches in a collective call to arms.
Starting with the 2010 explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig that saw four million barrels of oil flood into the Gulf of Mexico, Klein's works document the effects of large-scale disasters such as the wildfires that burnt through Canada's British Columbia in 2017, or the aftermath of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico a few months later. She also explores some of the economic, scientific, social and political issues associated with climate change that have been raised in the past decade.
The chronological order serves to highlight how much, and how little, has changed. The effect is punctuated by Klein's occasional footnotes and postscripts, which provide updates and reflections.
"It's a nagging reminder that we are in a fast-moving crisis, even though it may not always seem so," Klein writes in the thorough introduction.
The book's subtitle refers to the environmental and social policy championed by Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, and of which Klein is also a prominent advocate.
The closing chapters and epilogue discuss the Green New Deal as Klein makes her case for action. She is not blind to the complexities of what addressing climate change will mean, but she is absolute that we have no choice.
The clarity and passion of Klein's writing and her ability to hone in on what is actually going on and focus the reader is what turned her previous books, No Logo and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, into phenomena.
On Fire is no exception, and read with a backdrop of the 2019 climate strikes, Klein's words are as powerful as ever.
- On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, by Naomi Klein. Penguin Random House. $29.99.
