56 The New York Review
offers a blueprint for how a GND could
transform the global political economy
and an argument that nothing short of
this will stave off a climate crisis.
Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Ev-
erything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,
became a touchstone of progressive
climate activism. It’s the single stron-
gest statement we have for why carbon-
fueled capitalism (or “extractivism”),
with its imperative of relentless growth
and exploitation, is fundamentally in-
compatible with ecological sustainabil-
ity and social justice. Klein skewers not
only neoliberal policymakers and fossil
fuel companies, but also “Big Green”
organizations, including the Nature
Conservancy and the Environmen-
tal Defense Fund, for accepting funds
from major polluters and failing to sup-
port rapid decarbonization. Her title is
her argument: if we want to escape the
climate catastrophe, nothing short of
radical change will do.
The Green New Deal is the policy
that Klein could not quite envision in
This Changes Everything, and On Fire
should be read as that book’s coda.
Klein now sees the GND as the only
realistic way to address the current
climate emergency. She advocates a
sweeping, comprehensive GND—one
that includes an extensive social reor-
ganization through new infrastructure,
decarbonization, wealth redistribution,
reparations, resource sharing, guaran-
teed jobs, child care, and healthcare
for all. Strategies like carbon taxation,
cap and trade, and urban planning for
extreme weather and disasters are, she
says, insufficient and doomed to fail.
Klein does not propose specific policies
or analyze the details of current GND
proposals. But the sum total of her de-
mands—the things we “must” do to
manage the climate crisis and promote
social equity—would place her some-
where to the left of AOC and Bernie
Sanders. “Change everything” remains
her rallying cry.
At first glance, On Fire is nowhere
near as ambitious as Klein’s other
books. After its rousing introduction,
the book is a mishmash of short, un-
even pieces on subjects ranging from
suffocating wildfires on the West Coast
to the 2015 papal encyclical on climate.
It does not propose a master narrative
to explain the current situation. It lacks
the deep reporting that distinguishes
her most influential work. It’s repetitive
and unfairly dismissive of some genu-
inely difficult scientific and political
questions that deserve more open de-
bate: To what extent should we invest
in or begin regulating geo- engineering
projects for sunlight reflection to cool
the earth or cloud brightening to re-
freeze warming polar regions, if they
become necessary? How will states
compel citizens to consume differently
and reduce what are, for now, the con-
ventional standards of good living?
And how do we build the common
ground that is necessary for tackling
the climate crisis, and persuade people
who are not already behind the Green
New Deal that it’s our best hope?
Yet Klein is a talented polemicist,
and On Fire is a powerful manifesto.
Readers with a more scholarly dispo-
sition may be put off by her admoni-
tions and instructions, but Klein isn’t
trying to win over the seminar room
or the swing voter. She wants to cat-
alyze a movement, and her gambit is
that On Fire will be as effective for to-
day’s political fight over climate as her
1999 book, No Logo, was in the anti-
globalization campaign. What it will
not do is persuade skeptics, including
people who care about global warming
but don’t share Klein’s politics, that a
GND is politically feasible, given the
vehement right-wing opposition to it as
well as the enormous costs associated
with the Covid-19 pandemic response
and recovery. It offers no coherent
strategy for overcoming partisan op-
position to progressive environmental
and economic policies, no likely path-
ways to the more just, sustainable world
Klein wants to build. This is unfortu-
nate, because we’re unlikely to get a
Green New Deal without a widespread,
re invigorated belief in public goods,
such as programs to promote healthycities and environments.
But the coronavirus pandemic has
upended conventional politics and
created possibilities for genuine so-
cial change, albeit in either direction.
If ever there were an opportunity to
advocate for new social and economic
models, this is it.Purdy, a legal scholar and theorist of
democracy with a philosophical bent,
shares Klein’s activist concerns but is
deeply invested in the search for com-
mon ground. This Land Is Our Land
begins with a problem of language. “In
the years that I have been an adult,”
Purdy writes, “homeland has grown
from a word Americans did not really
use to a slogan by which we are ruled.”
The concept of homeland “suggests a
place of deep unity, where we all come
from, a kind of family.” What we have
now is the very opposite: enmity, divi-
sion, conflict, nationalism. Our com-
mitment to shared things has dwindled.
A society that once grew prosperous
by investing in public goods, such as
schools, universities, libraries, and
mass transit systems, is now organized
around private markets. The president
declares that enormous sections of our
national parks—at least one million
acres in Bears Ears National Monu-
ment and some 800,000 acres in GrandStaircase-Escalante National Monu-
ment—should no longer be protected
from development, but should instead
be mined for coal and uranium and
drilled for oil and gas. His big idea for
new infrastructure: build a wall.
In America’s approach to the climate
crisis, the walls that block real engage-
ment are both mental and physical.
There is, Purdy notes, the towering
wall of American climate change de-
nial, conceived, funded, and manufac-
tured by the world’s largest fossil fuel
companies, including ExxonMobil,
whose research scientists identified the
dangers of global warming back when
there was ample time to stop or reverse
it. After burying these findings, oil ti-
tans seeded the policy field with thinktanks and public relations firms that
generated just enough skepticism to
stymie the push for investment in re-
newable energy sources. Though Purdy
doesn’t dwell on it, the oil industry’s
hugely profitable public relations cam-
paign will likely cause more death and
destruction than any lobbying effort in
human history.^3
As climate denial becomes unten-
able, conservative politicians are be-
ginning to argue that tech firms and
engineers have the tools we need to
adapt, so ambitious government proj-
ects to decarbonize the energy system
and shift consumption patterns won’t
be necessary. Senator Marco Rubio,
for instance, recently acknowledged
that “Florida will be forced to con-
tinue making adjustments in the com-
ing decades because of the changing
climate,” but he rejected calls for the
GND and other large mitigation ef-
forts on the specious grounds that “the
world is not going to end in 12 years assome climate alarmists claim.” Instead,
he promised that “through proactive
adaptation alone”—by which he means
protecting vulnerable areas with walls,
gates, and berms, rather than reducing
greenhouse gas emissions—“Ameri-
cans could reduce damage caused by
climate change to coastal property
through 2099 by 90 percent.” This is
a dangerous illusion, not only because
we lack the technology (and, absent a
GND, the funding) for climate- proofing
coastlines, but also because even the
best oceanfront defenses cannot sus-
tain our overheated cities, our agri-
cultural system, our water supply, or
marine life, all of which are in serious
danger.
Purdy believes that reckoning with
climate change demands a deeper and
more comprehensive overhaul of our
infrastructure, and This Land Is Our
Land is an invitation to imagine the
new world—and the new society—that
this overhaul could produce. Drawing
on a growing body of scholarly work on
how the built environment influences
social and economic action, Purdy de-
fines infrastructure broadly.^4 First, it is
the set of engineered systems, includ-
ing “roads, rails, utility lines, farmland,
and housing,” that help determine
where and how we engage with each
other. Second, it is the “immaterial sys-
tems,” such as money, laws, and consti-
tutions, that structure the economy and
“in turn shape the global carbon cycle,
the food system, mineral extraction,”
and so forth. Finally, it is “the basic do-
mains and cycles of the natural world:
the global atmosphere, the water cycles
and waterways, the soil and its fertil-
ity.” These, of course, are no longer
fully natural. The idea of the Anthro-
pocene is that we have remade the at-
mosphere, the waterways, the soil, the
seas—and endangered ourselves in the
process.
“We are creatures of our built envi-
ronment, an infrastructure species,”
Purdy writes. “By changing it, we
change ourselves—change what we are
to one another and to the planet.”^5 Just
as the places, systems, and networks we
built to promote urban industrialism
and global financial capitalism remade
us socially and politically, so too will
the systems that nations build to acco-
modate life in the new climate.
It matters whether societies choose
walls or bridges; it matters whether,
and how quickly, we leave oil in the
ground and harness the power of sun
and wind. Seawalls, like border walls,
protect those on one side at the expense
of all life on the other. Since Hurricane
Sandy hit New York City in 2012, much
of the focus of officials and engineers
has been on protecting Manhattan,
whose wealth, density, and expensive
critical infrastructure are increasingly
vulnerable to catastrophic flooding.
Some barriers—including a series of
giant berms for Lower Manhattan andA bridge damaged by Hurricane Maria, Utuado, Puerto Rico, November 2017Matt Black/Magnum Photos(^3) We know this story already, thanks
in large part to Naomi Oreskes and
Erik Conway, who tell it well in their
2010 book and 2015 companion film,
Merchants of Doubt, and to Nathan-
iel Rich’s 2019 book, Losing Earth:
A Recent History (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux).
(^4) The most influential scholarly work
on infrastructure includes William
Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (Norton,
1991) and the late Susan Leigh Star’s
“Ethnography of Infrastructure,” Amer-
ican Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 43, No. 3
(1999).
(^5) The “infrastructure species” idea is
developed in Purdy’s excellent book
After Nature: A Politics for the An-
thropocene (Harvard University Press,
2015).