Documentary calls for economic overhaul to save environment

TORONTO – Canadian journalist Naomi Klein became an important commenter on the world scene with her 2007 book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Her latest book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” talks about the overhaul needed to our economic system if we want to save our land, water and food from destruction.

It’s a controversial approach, especially here in the U.S., where a very loud faction of the political class does not even believe that climate change is real.

Last month, the Toronto International Film Festival premiered the documentary film based on the book, directed by Klein’s husband, Canadian filmmaker/journalist Avi Lewis. It ends on a surprisingly hopeful note, as ordinary people from around the world start to rise up and effect change for the better.

Klein and Lewis answered questions at the Toronto Film Festival last month.

Q: Big-business conservatives have been able to persuade many social conservatives to support their anti-environmental agenda. How can they be split apart?

Lewis: Nobody will ever again ask that as a first question.

Klein: This is why I’m excited that the pope is coming to Philadelphia. (Pope Francis visited the U.S. last month for the World Meeting of Families. He spoke about climate change in an address on the White House lawn in Washington, D.C.) It’s one thing for the pope to publish an encyclical that’s barely amplified in the U.S. media, but when the pope himself comes and addresses Congress and comes to Philadelphia, he’s going to talk about it. And when you read the encyclical … Allowing the planet to burn is a profoundly unconservative thing to do. It’s actually very radical.

Q: You seem to be saying that climate change is more of a big business vs. the people problem rather than a liberal vs. conservative problem.

Klein: Of the characters in the film from Montana, Alexis (whose farm with her husband, Mike, is covered by an oil spill) comes from a Republican family and a lot of the ranchers they work with in Montana are …

Lewis: True conservatives. They conserve.

Klein: A lot of them used to be Republicans but they’ve stopped. But they have this strong ethic of land stewardship, and it’s a great example of genuine bipartisanship, what’s happening there.

Lewis: Mike and Alexis are as red-state as you can get. The first time we met them they had an AK-47 in the guest room, and there’s a freezer full of deer meat.

As a guy who’s lived in Toronto all my life, these are not my people. And yet they totally are. This may be a way out of these boxes we’ve constructed. When people are defending their way of life – or their land or their water or their neighborhood – from trains full of tar-sands bitumen coming through their communities, they come together to defend that way of life. And these labels, like “climate denier” or “conservative,” I don’t know what they mean.

I hope that people see in our film that these are not activists in many of these places. These are people who, for whatever reason, see a need to engage with the big issues of our time, and they come together to do it. There’s a great deal of hope to be taken from that.

Q: It seems that protecting the environment should not be party-specific.

Klein: It shouldn’t be. Nixon introduced some of the best environmental laws in the history of the United States.

Lewis: We had better environmental policy under our first famous conservative prime minister in Canada. It was a conservative-led coalition government in Germany, when facing popular pressure, that brought in hugely interventionist policies, which created 400,000 jobs and got Germany to 30 percent renewables in their electricity system.

Klein: But it is also true that, at this stage in the game, it is impossible to deal with climate change within a free-market ideological worldview. Climate change is a problem that needs government regulation, that needs market intervention, that needs investment in the public sphere. These are nonnegotiable.

Lewis: We need pragmatists who are really looking at what’s going on in our world.