This Changes Everything

“Moving from Extraction to Renewal” (Pages 419-424)

Klein shares how she lost the ability to enjoy nature for a time because of the shadow of the ecological crisis. She describes this as “pre-grief,” a sense of coming loss. Being involved in the international environmentalist movement has brought fresh hope. She tells of her personal experience trying to get pregnant, which coincided with the five years she spent writing and researching this book. After a miscarriage and surgery, she tried IVF but came to a point where she felt she had to give that option up. She describes how her pregnancy journey interacted with writing this book and affected her mindset. The talk about saving the world for “our children” and the notion of “Mother Earth” was emotionally difficult for her at that time. Where did it leave someone who was struggling with fertility? How could she relate to “mother Earth”?

Her view changed when saw that Mother Earth was facing a great many fertility challenges of her own, with industrialization interfering with systems at the heart of the Earth’s fertility cycle. Many other species besides ours are struggling with infertility, finding it harder to reproduce and protect their young. The Earth’s ingenious systems of reproducing life and the fertility of all of its inhabitants may lie at the center of the shift in worldview that’s needed to take us away from extractivist thinking.

“An Aquatic Miscarriage” (Pages 424-427)

Klein was covering the BP oil spill in Louisiana when she found out she was pregnant. However, the doctor told her that her hormone levels were so low she would most likely miscarry again. Her mind raced back to the time she spent inhaling toxins in Louisiana while covering the spill, and she blamed herself. Weeks later, she found out it was an ectopic pregnancy (where the fetus grows outside of the uterus, which can cause maternal fatality), and it had to be terminated. It was a painful loss, though it was a relief that it wasn’t her time in Louisiana that had caused this to happen.

Klein reflects on her time covering the spill, journeying on a boat through the Mississippi Delta to discover the extent of the damage it had caused. Her colleague was worried about the fate of the microscopic zooplankton that would be devastated by the oil spilled here for years to come. Klein reflects, “I started to think of that time in the marsh as my miscarriage inside a miscarriage” (427). With that, she let go of the idea that infertility made her some sort of exile from nature. She started to feel instead that she was part of a “vast biotic community, and it was a place where a great many of us–humans and nonhuman alike—found ourselves engaged in an uphill battle to create new living beings” (427).

“A Country for Old Men” (Pages 427-430)

Klein argues that our culture pays little attention to the vulnerability of children and developing life; most testing of products and ideas have adults in mind. She points out that clusters of infertility are very often the first warning signs of a broader health crisis and cites the example of rural Colorado, where studies show that fracking caused birth rates to drop considerably, and there are higher cases of children born at unhealthy weights and with congenital defects.

Infant defects, Klein argues, are most common in areas closest to the dirtiest parts of the fossil fuel economy. She gives the example of Mossville, Louisiana, a town set up by formerly enslaved Black Americans, which has seen 14 unwanted oil and gas refineries set up nearby since the 40s. These plants spew toxic chemicals that are causing cancer, respiratory illness, and very high rates of infertility and birth defects. One resident said the town had become a “toxic womb” (430). Klein notes the way that oil and gas companies were allowed to set up here with impunity and the lack of concern for these people as “a textbook case of environmental racism” (429).

“BP’s Legacy and a ‘Handful of Nothing’” (Pages 430-434)

Klein points out that if the impact of extractivist activities on human reproduction gets little attention, then non-human reproduction is even less of a concern. She cites the BP risk assessment on what would happen in the event of a spill, which claimed many fish and crabs would be able to swim to safety or metabolize hydrocarbons and made no mention of vulnerable eggs, larvae, or juveniles. The spill in Louisiana has created an aquatic infertility crisis, which only started to become apparent a year later, after a full breeding cycle.

However, “missing fish don’t tend to make the news” (431), and there are no pictures to document this loss, just an absence where fish would have been, a “handful of nothing” (431). Not so for the baby dolphins, who were dying en masse in 2011 and washing up on the Gulf Coast. This did get some attention. Studies show a steep rise in dolphin infertility in these waters and a spike in unusual illnesses and birth defects. This is a result both of the oil spill and of changing weather patterns linked to climate change: “the one two punch of an economy built on fossil fuels” (434).

“Disappearing Babies in a Warming World” (Pages 434-436)

Climate change creates pressures that are robbing life forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and preserve their genetic line. Klein cites several examples from recent studies: sea turtles that outlasted the dinosaurs and are struggling to reproduce in warming sands; the oysters along the Pacific coast of Oregon; the Caribou Calves of West Greenland; wolverine cubs; peregrine falcon chicks; and Arctic ring seal pups.

Climate change is hitting the very young first and worst. In a sense, it’s obvious: the young are most vulnerable, and the delicate mechanisms of fertility can easily be affected by hostile and changing conditions. Klein points out that we tend to think of extinction as a species-wide thing, but in the age of fossil fuels, we are making species extinct from “the bottom up” by undermining their ability to reproduce: “We render the Earth less alive by […] interfering with the capacity of adults to reproduce in the first place” (435). This mode of extinction is invisible; it leaves “no corpses, just an absence” (435).

“Fallow Times” (Pages 436-442)

Klein continues her fertility story. She saw a naturopathic doctor, who took a more natural approach, pointing to the effects of stress and encouraging Klein to stop overtaxing her system. Klein was skeptical but gave it a try. She went down the road of yoga, meditation, and dietary changes. She swapped urban Toronto for her family home in British Columbia. She reflects on the analogies with climate change: We need to stop putting pressure on the Earth and find ways to rekindle its natural fertility cycles. She points to the success of agroecological farming methods that cultivate natural growth and perennials over chemical and industrial fixes.

Around this time, Klein’s son was conceived. She stayed ready “for tragedy” through the pregnancy. Klein says that hiking helped her relax, and she would walk by a stream, watching out for salmon smolts making their journey to the sea. She would picture the cohos, pinks, and chums swimming back upstream to their spawning grounds: “This was my son’s determination, I would tell myself. He was clearly a fighter having managed to make his way to me despite the odds” (440). Klein looks to the salmon as a symbol of the resilience and determination of life in its drive to carry on the life cycle. She also notes the effects of climate change and human intervention on the salmon; they are strong, but they are not invincible.

Her fertility story has a happy ending. Her son was born healthy. However, Klein resists the notion that this is a story of human resilience winning in the end. She prefers to see in her own story a warning against pushing the bounds of nature too far and to accept with humility that in human fertility, so much is luck, and there is much we don’t know. She returns to the image of the marsh in the oil spill and herself on the boat, carrying her own ill-fated embryo. The wider lesson she draws is that the gift of life “requires a special kind of nurturing and a constant vigilance […] Just because biology is full of generosity doesn’t mean its forgiveness is limitless” (442).

“Coming Back to Life” (Pages 442-448)

Klein is struck by a speech by a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, Leanne Simpson, who said, “our systems are designed to promote more life” (442). This is the opposite of the extractivist approach, which takes, creates, wastes, and destroys life. This focus on regeneration is, for Klein, the key to the new relationship with nature that’s requited. It’s in Indigenous cultures, and it’s in the spirit of Blockadia. As the struggle against climate change and fossil fuels continues, these views are spreading.

She describes the movement as a reproductive rights movement for people and the whole planet: “all of life has the right to renew, regenerate, and heal itself” (443). It goes hand in hand with acknowledging “we are part of a vast living system” (443). In the face of extreme energy and the damage it’s doing, many people are also remembering and recovering their own cultures of land stewardship and recognizing our role as one of life promotion. Faced with threats to collective safety from fossil fuel industries and climate change disasters, these old, intrinsic ideas are reasserting themselves, cross-pollinating, and taking on new shapes. In other words, we never lost our connection with nature; we just forgot it for a while, and the current crisis is helping us remember. Klein cites Halkidiki, in Greece, and the intergenerational struggle against fossil fuel companies there, which has brought teenagers and grandmothers together, both with very different but mutually-enforcing experiences and skill sets.

Protecting nature’s fertility cycle is at the heart of the green social alternatives we must adopt, from renewable energy to eco-agriculture and living buildings. This means an end to the old linear extractivist relationship with nature and a return to something circular and reciprocal, where we don’t take without also putting back in, nurturing, and promoting the cycle of life in all its diversity: “The goal becomes not to build a few gigantic green solutions, but to infinitely multiply smaller ones” (443).

Klein notes some small-scale forms of extraction will continue, including logging and mining, but they must be controlled by the people on those lands and governed by a principle of protecting and nurturing nature; we must “become full participants in the process of maximizing life’s creativity” (446). Klein sees a living example of this nurturing relationship in the stream she walked by when pregnant as she found out that the salmon there are supported by a local hatchery and volunteers.