On Fire
The Burning Case for a Green New Deal
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A MUST-READ book. Naomi Klein pairs a decade of her powerful writing on our acute environmental decline with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of what we choose to do next; and inspiringly offers here a politically viable, just, sustainable path forward.
For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet--and the champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with stability and justice at its center. In lucid dispatches from the frontlines--from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented "ecological conversion"--she has penned surging, indispensable lectures and essays for a wide public, with prescient, clarifying information about the future that awaits us and our children if we stick our heads in the sand. They show Klein at her most thoughtful, tracing the evolution of the climate crisis as the key issue of our time, not only as an immediate political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one too.
Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of "perpetual now," to the soaring history of humans' ability to change rapidly in the face of grave threat, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of "climate barbarism," this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. Above all, she underscores how we can still rise to the existential challenge of the crisis if we are willing to transform our systems that are producing it, making clear how the battle for a greener world is indistinguishable from the fight for our lives.
On Fire is a critical book: it captures the burning urgency of this moment, the fiery energy of a rising movement demanding change now, and lays out an inspiring vision for a sustainable future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Klein (This Changes Everything) makes a case for a Green New Deal in a treatise high on passion, but low on specifics. It consists largely of reprinted writings reporting, think pieces, public talks with brief notes providing updates. After an account of speaking at a 2015 Vatican press conference on Pope Francis's climate change encyclical, Klein comments that the Church's encouraging gesture now seems overshadowed by a lack of accountability over its sexual abuse crisis. These retrospective pieces lack the urgency of the book's lengthy introduction about fostering "economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet's life support system and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them." In the brief epilogue, Klein returns to the book's main thrust and argues the Green New Deal still has a "fighting chance." But even that formulation acknowledges the difficulties involved, and her more extravagant proposals for instance, transforming every post office in her native Canada into a "hub for green transition" don't encourage confidence in her ambitious program. Klein's cri de coeur ("when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve") will galvanize some and depress others.)