Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything” offered a glimpse into the effects of climate change and environment-destroying human activities as experienced today by real people. We have a tendency to view environmental destruction as a distant problem for future generations, especially in urban areas like New York where there’s hardly any natural environment left to disturb, but Klein’s film showed global examples of people’s lives and livelihoods being upended by environmental damage. The biggest takeaway I had from the film was the disparity of the effects of pollution and destruction felt by those of means versus those in poverty or part of oppressed communities. It’s incredibly important to remember that the people affected the most are often the most invisible. Indigenous people, local fisherman, rural goat farmers, all gain sustenance from their local land and all faced the threat of climate destruction at the hands or poorly regulated industry. Klein, not afraid of politicizing climate change, put much, if not all of the blame on capitalism. Corporations were the enemy in many of the stories we watched.
The film ended on an optimistic note and it’s with optimism that I left that (sweltering) auditorium. Designers have the capability to make great change in how business run (especially strategy designers as I’m currently being groomed to be). There are ways to mitigate the effects of capitalism on the environment and the wellbeing of our global population. It’s also possible to instill these values in kids even younger than us college students. There was a discussion after the film about the stage at which people should be familiarized with the threat of climate change. One student believed that children don’t have the capacity to understand the importance of their actions on the environment. With this I whole-heartedly disagree. Maybe it’s because I was raised with an awareness of the cyclical nature of our environment, in a school system that took us to our county recycling plant, in a county where separating recyclables by type was the norm and the bins were collected by the county government, but I believe children are sustainability sponges. Imagine if sustainability was taught in public high schools, middle schools, preschools, even. By college we would all have the principles of sustainability engrained in all of our practices and bring this awareness to any endeavor.
