Naomi Klein – “On why young people see radical action as practical”

Author and activist Naomi Klein has some perceptive comments in an interview in the Tyee – the independent British Columbia journal on why young people are more ready for drastic change to address continuing problems like climate change where progress has been slow or not much at all.

The full article is entitled, “We Faces a Series of Radical Options“

Klein is the recent author of “This Changes Everything” -a book challenging the notion that we can ignore climate change and not see significant impacts around the world. She supports a tax on fossil fuels pollutants to help transition  the world to renewable nonpolluting energy use and to help native tribes and others who have suffered significant impacts due to extraction of fossil fuels.  She supports Bernie Sanders for President.

Below are her comments “On why young people see radical action as practical“:

“The young people I meet understand that we’re on a deadline and there is definitely a sense, particularly in the U.S., of the system being so deeply broken that radical solutions are indeed practical, and that this idea that we’re going to tinker around the edges and go slowly is ridiculous. We are at a moment in time when we face a series of radical options. Steady as she goes is not one of them. We either face a radical physical future or else we embrace some radical political and economic change. That’s hard for an older generation that has invested its identity in cautious centrism to accept, whereas for a lot young people it’s sort of in their blood.

“The new generation is one that has come of age in a time of multiple system failures that are impossible to ignore, whether it’s financial markets or the climate. And young people are the ones dealing with all the blowback from that. Given these overlapping system failures, I think it makes sense why they have more of an appetite for systemic change. But our challenge is connecting the dots between these multiple system failures. I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job of that yet and when we do I think we’ll start to see a broader movement.”