English
YA
Environmental Activism
Sustainability
Activism
Youth
Community Change
Accountability
Naomi Kline with Rebecca Stefoff
summary
If you haven’t read The Shock Doctrine, you definitely need to. But, this review is about Naomi’s recently adapted YA book How to Change Everything. As a couple who chose where and how they live based on sustainability, it’s an extremely important piece of our lives. If you want to have a hand (or a thumbprint) in changing the future, you need to check out this one! For #SweetsAndSocialJustice this week, I’ve paired some of my homemade raspberry jam (with raspberries picked at my community garden) with orange shortbread. The zest was taken from some oranges before I juiced them to make orange sugar!
Naomi takes the gargantuan subject of the climate crisis and breaks it down expertly with Rebecca Stefoff (who you may remember from my Freedom Summer review) and lays bare the ways in which youth activism is leading the charge to change, well, everything. Kline balances statistics and science with stories about environmental successes (such as when the Maori sued NZ government for them to designate a river with personhood). Important topics like greenwashing, the many facets of activism, and how exactly we figure out how much the global temperature is rising (as well as many more) are found inside the book.
Sinking deeply into this topic is stressful, but necessary. Although individual choices do not impact the health of the planet nearly as much as capitalism and corporations, it’s up to us to change the legislative landscape and demand accountability from them. Kline and Stefoff have written an impactful book that doesn’t sugarcoat the severity of the crisis, but gives tangible examples and options for how we can all get involved.
This book was kindly sent by Simon & Schuster, but all opinions are my own.
Recipe: Orange Raspberry Thumbprint Cookies
Ingredients:
16T soft butter
3/4c orange sugar (I zest citrus into sugar to let the oil flavor it for various baking products. It’s a great way to use every bit of something before I compost it.) You can of course use regular sugar, if you want a plain dough.
3T orange juice
pinch of salt
1t vanilla
1 medium egg
2 3/4c all-purpose flour (I used King Arthur GF 1:1)
Raspberry jam
Directions: Preheat oven to 350. Cream butter, sugar, and salt. Add in egg, vanilla, and juice. Add in flour and mix until cohesive, but not overworked. This is essentially impossible with gluten free flours, but can make glutinous baked goods tough. At this point I usually taste the dough and see if the flavor is strong enough, adding a bit more juice, zest, or sometimes a bit of orange oil if I want it more punchy. Roll balls the size you desire (I usually do balls about an inch in size) and press your thumb into the top to create a well for the jam. Spoon the jam into the well and bake approximately 13-15 minutes. The bigger the cookies, the longer they will take!
Naomi Kline
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, and No Is Not Enough. A Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, reporter for Rolling Stone, and contributor for both The Nation and The Guardian, Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is cofounder of the climate justice organization The Leap.
Rebecca Stefoff
Rebecca Stefoff has written more than 50 books for young adults, specializing in geography and biography. She earned her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Portland, Oregon.