Let Them Drown – a 10 tweet summary of the 2016 Edward Said London Lecture, delivered by Naomi Klein

Posted bymartin

The 2016 Edward W. Said London Lecture was delivered by Naomi Klein at the Royal Festival Hall; entitled “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World”. Here’s a short summary of this excellent lecture:

Why should we care about climate change?

Climate change is inherently political. It involves people, power and suffering.

Caring about the environment is not a liberal indulgence. ‘The environment’ isn’t somewhere else – our world is our shared political landscape.


Klein noted that water stress and conflict often correlate: “The brutal landscape of the climate crisis”

Othering and environmental damage go hand-in-hand

Klein identified the pivotal intersection between seeing groups of people as ‘other’ – as inferior and with lesser rights – with environmental damage.
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Desire for economic growth is the dominant western value system. The values of indigenous people are seen as less important. So their resources can be exploited without their consent, and their links to the land can be severed.

This ‘othering’ can happen with whole nations, such as Iran, where Orientalism was used to justify the 1953 anti-democratic coup.

And until we recognise stateless people and people fleeing climate change as refugees, we’re failing our fellow humans because we see them as lesser.

What could the future look like?

We shouldn’t just see climate change as caused by a monolithic ‘human nature’. The forces behind climate change – capitalism and environmental destruction – have always been contested.

“Climate change acts as an accelerant for our social ills… but it could be the catalyst for the opposite”

Klein challenged the audience to take a broader view of our lives and their significance. What does it mean to have a good life on this planet?

Klein argued that political and environmental action are inherently bound together. Communities owning and controlling their own renewable energy is an example of the joined-up progress we need.

We can’t just prioritise our own country when thinking about climate change. Doing so is to accept a hierarchy of humanity.

And we can’t just think through the framework of neo-liberal consumer choices. Environmental-political change is bigger than that. You can form coalitions that are bigger than those you’d expect from individual consumer choices alone: