Naomi Klein
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.Collection: Poetry
Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don't change course, if we don't change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.Collection: Change
Nike was the essence of sports, transcendence through sports.Collection: Sports
What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late '60s and in the '70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called 'command-and-control' pieces of legislation.Collection: Environmental
The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity.Collection: Food
That's the big mistake the environmental movement made - 'We'll scare the hell out of you, and you'll become an activist'.Collection: Environmental
One shouldn't gamble with what is irreplaceable and precious.
When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?
We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality, and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.
Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
Brands like Starbucks came along and talked about their brand as itself being a community, the idea that Starbucks is what they like to call a 'third place,' which is not their idea; it's the idea of basic citizenry needing a place that is not work, that is not home, where citizens gather.
My grandfather was actually a union organizer at Walt Disney. He was an animator. He used to draw Donald Duck for Walt Disney.
We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.
I am about safety for the people and the planet.
The Trump Organization is paid millions of dollars by these developers for the privilege of putting the Trump name on those towers.
A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them. When we find ourselves in that position, without a story, without our moorings, a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good.
The electoral strategy for 2016 was, 'Vote for me; I'm not Trump,' and, 'Trump is dangerous, so get out and vote.'
I can tell you Donald Trump's products may not be made in America, but Donald Trump was made in America.
My father was born in Newark, New Jersey, and my mother was born in Philadelphia. They both went to Stanford for grad school and met there.
Everybody that's trying to get anything progressive done in this country knows that the biggest barrier is getting money out of politics.
I think I'm a critic of corporate power, whether locally or globally. And the term 'globalization' I've never found all that helpful.
The divestment movement is a start at challenging the excesses of capitalism. It's working to delegitimize fossil fuels and showing that they're just as unethical as profits from the tobacco industry.
Trump would have been unelectable were it not for the groundwork laid by Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, two liberal heroes.
I am not saying Russia is not important, but Trump's base is very well defended against that: 'the liberal media is out to get him', 'it's fake news', and all the rest.
Fossil fuels are - they're inherently centralized. And you need a lot of infrastructure to get them out, and you need a lot of infrastructure to transport it, as Obama was explaining in front of all that pipe, right? Whereas renewable energy is everywhere.
The reason why nothing sticks to Trump - or very little sticks to Trump - is that he created this brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it.
This phrase, 'culture jamming,' was very much in vogue in the 1990s when these superbrands sort of emerged and started kind of projecting their names onto ever more surfaces.
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day.
I don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.
Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.
Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.
That is the core of Trump. He is undoubtedly an idiot, but do not underestimate how good he is at that.
If David Duke got the percentage of the vote that Le Pen got, we would be terrified, as well we should be.
Among my generation, there was a purist position that any contact with electoral politics was an unforgiveable compromise.
There have been presidents with business interests before. But there has never been a fully commercialized global brand as a sitting U.S. president. That is unprecedented.
I had maybe watched 'The Apprentice' a couple of times. I didn't know that in later seasons they deported half of their contestants into tents in the backyard. They called it Trump's trailer park.
I want to act, if I can, as a bridge for people who read 'Shock Doctrine' or 'No Logo'. People who are sitting out for whatever reasons.
I think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying, 'This is the issue that beats all other issues,' or, 'Your issue doesn't matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.'
What I hope is less about what the greens will do but what people who don't consider themselves part of the green movement will do.
The way in which people talk about climate is just so wonky and so abstract and such a boys' club that it makes a lot of women just roll their eyes or feel that they are somehow not qualified. I certainly had to fight that feeling in myself in order to write about it.
I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system - I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.
We live in a society that is powered by fossil fuels, but for the meantime, we're in it. Maybe there's, like, five people living in the woods off-grid, but they're spending all their time maintaining that, and they don't have much time left over for anything else.
If you're biking more and walking more, you're going to be happier and healthier. And you'll probably feel better if you take out less garbage, as most of us feel pretty crappy about that. But I don't think we can mistake those acts for doing what it takes to address a crisis at a global level.
I think I would say that there is absolutely no way to reconcile an austerity agenda with climate action. Our political class needs to understand that the fight against austerity and the fight for climate action are the same fight.
I think there's a couple of things going on. One is that Trump's relationship with his base is not the traditional relationship of a politician and the people who elected him, and the constituency, which is a relationship of some accountability, right? The idea is that the politicians are working for the people. They're public servants.
This is what he has been selling on the 'The Apprentice', through his self-help books, how to - you know, 'Trump 101' or the 'Art of the Deal' or, really, back to 'Art of the Deal'. So almost the more he gets away with, the more he is reinforcing his brand.
Maybe Trump himself will be voted out through impeachment, right?
Because the Republicans are never going to turn on Trump so long as he still has his base, and he will continue to have his base so long as this idea that he is standing up for workers, it remains intact. And the only way that that gets eroded is if it isn't just about Russia all the time, but is also about those economic betrayals.
That is the meaning of the Trump brand - being the boss who is so rich and so powerful he can do whatever he wants. So the way in which he ran for president was to embody that idea as fully as he possibly could with his outrageousness.
I do believe that our ability to jam the Trump brand is somewhat limited. I think we can chip away at it, but ultimately, the way to undermine the Trump brand is a better product in the political marketplace, if you'll forgive the capitalist metaphor.