The No Logo author talks about solutions to the climate crisis, Greta Thunberg, birth strikes and how she finds hope
• Read an extract from her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal here
Why are you publishing this book now?
I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.
The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind about anything?
When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.
Hundreds of newsrooms around the world are banding together this week to commit their pages and air time to what may be the most consequential story of our time.
The individual decisions that we make are not going to add up to anything like the kind of scale of change that we need
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