Read This Changes Everything for Free Online Page B

Denial
    Some say there is no time for this transformation; the crisis is too pressing and the clock is ticking. I agree that it would be reckless to claim that the only solution to this crisis is to revolutionize our economy and revamp our worldview from the bottom up—and anything short of that is not worth doing. There are all kinds of measures that wouldlower emissions substantively that could and should be done right now. But we aren’t taking those measures, are we? The reason is that by failing to fight these big battles that stand to shift our ideological direction and change the balance of who holds power in our societies, a context has been slowly created in which any muscular response to climate change seems politically impossible, especiallyduring times of economic crisis (which lately seems to be all the time).
    So this book proposes a different strategy: think big, go deep, and move the ideological pole far away from the stifling market fundamentalism that has become the greatest enemy to planetary health. If we can shift the cultural context even a little, then there will be some breathing room for those sensible reformist policiesthat will at least get the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the right direction. And winning is contagious so, who knows? Maybe within a few years, some of the ideas highlighted in these pages that sound impossibly radical today—like a basic income for all, or a rewriting of trade law, or real recognition of the rights of Indigenous people to protect huge parts of the world from pollutingextraction—will start to seem reasonable, even essential.
    For a quarter of a century, we have tried the approach of polite incremental change, attempting to bend the physical needs of the planet to our economic model’s need for constant growth and new profit-making opportunities. The results have been disastrous, leaving us all in a great deal more danger than when the experiment began.
    Thereare, of course, no guarantees that a more systemic approach will be any more successful—though there are, as will be explored later on, historical precedents that are grounds for hope. The truth is that this is the hardest book I have ever written, precisely because the research has led me to search out such radical responses. I have no doubt of their necessity, but I question their political feasibilityevery day, especially given that climate change puts us on such a tight and unforgiving deadline.
----
    It’s been a harder book to write for personal reasons too.
    What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It’s the books I read to my two-year-old. Have You Ever Seen a Moose? is one of his favorites. It’s about a bunch of kids that really,really, really want to see a moose. They search high and low—through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for “a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose.” The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: “We’ve never ever seen so many moose!”
    On about the seventy-fifth reading, it suddenlyhit me: he might neversee a moose. I tried to hold it together. I went back to my computer and began to write about my time in northern Alberta, tar sands country, where members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation told me about how the moose had changed—one woman described killing a moose on a hunting trip only to find that the flesh had already turned green. I heard a lot about strange tumors too,which locals assumed had to do with the animals drinking water contaminated by tar sands toxins. But mostly I heard about how the moose were simply gone.
    And not just in Alberta. “Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard,” reads a May 2012 headline in Scientific American. A year and a half later, The New York Times was reporting that one of Minnesota’s two moose populationshad