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.