Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
Naomi KleinRead
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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding the connection between social inequality and climate change, advocating for comprehensive solutions to address both issues.
Naomi Klein's quote highlights the urgent need for holistic approaches to tackle the intertwined crises of inequality and climate change. It suggests that as our world becomes increasingly interconnected, isolated solutions are ineffective; instead, we need strategies that address both social and environmental issues simultaneously to create a more equitable and sustainable future.
In practice
In a speech about climate policy, one could quote this to emphasize the need for inclusive solutions.
Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
Because it is such a huge crisis, because it puts us on a firm science-based deadline, it's a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a better society and address raging inequality, create huge numbers of jobs, rebuild our public infrastructure. But, we can't do it unless we break every single rule in the free-market playbook. Which is why the worst people in the world all deny climate change.
Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
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 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 the fossil fuel industry is genuinely freaked out by the combination of the price collapse, the divestment movement, and that fact that renewable energy is getting so cheap so fast.
The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.
In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
You can be tweeting strangers and saying, 'Don't say that,' but are you saying that to your friends? How about your mom? Your boyfriend at the dinner table who says something homophobic? If you're not saying the same things in person that you're saying online, then what are your tweets doing?
Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are.
Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
The basis for sustainable progress is legal protections grounded in an awareness of how identity has been used to deny opportunity.
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