Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Author and activist best known for her book No Logo, which challenged globalization and corporate branding.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
The book
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:20Was there a moment when you thought, my goodness, I'm clearly on to something. This is bigger than just the book?
The book was at the printer when these protests in Seattle happened in 1999 against the World Trade Organization. There was a shift underway among young people. They were all about corporate power. They were defacing the corporate ads in the bathrooms. They had this sense that they were up against these transnational forces that were more powerful than governments. And it was this moment where this thing that I had been covering as a journalist for four years burst onto the international stage. And I remember I pitched to the New York Times an op-ed, very arrogant. Here I was, this Canadian with no international profile at all. And I said, I'd like to write a column for you guys about what these protests in Seattle are all about. And they said, well, we already have an op-ed about the WTO. And I said, who's the op-ed by? And they said, Bill Gates. Then Seattle just exploded. And then I got a call from the op-ed page of the New York Times going, maybe we could use that perspective after all. Maybe Bill Gates doesn't have it covered. And so that was the shift. That was the moment that maybe Bill Gates doesn't represent the spectrum of opinion on this question.
Presenter asks
6:04You've spoken about the fact that you came pretty late to the whole climate change thing. Why do you think that is?
For me, it sort of felt like there were all these big green groups that were really well funded that had this as their mission, as their mandate. And it seemed like, okay, well, this is one issue I don't have to care about. Al Gore's got … Which sounds pretty flip, but it wasn't that I didn't know about it or didn't care about it, but I think, like a lot of people, I felt like human rights, inequality, all of these injustices that I was focused on were more pressing, that lies were on the line right now. And climate change had been cast as this issue that we should care about because it's going to affect our grandkids. I mean, my wake-up call was covering Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and it was intersecting with a weak and neglected public sphere. The levees shouldn't have broken, but they broke because so much of our infrastructure is starved by the logic of austerity. And overlaying it all is systemic racism and who is considered disposable and who is not, and who gets saved and who doesn't. It's consistently people of color, poor people. We saw it in New Orleans. We see it now in Puerto Rico. Climate change can't just be an issue that is left to environmentalists. It has to be an issue that's taken up by all of us.
Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer
because I think that... If I were all on my own, I'd want the stars to be my company and I'd wanna understand them.
Presenter asks
9:41Your grandfather Philip was a huge influence on you. Why was that?
Well, so I grew up with these stories. I mean, partly because I am a draft dodger's daughter, and we came to Canada two years before I was born. My parents didn't really know anything about Canada except for that, you know, it was either jail or Canada if you didn't want to go to Vietnam. He originally tried to get conscientious objector status, but in order to get conscientious objector status, you need to prove that you have this history of war resistance. And he was unwilling to share very much information about his upbringing because basically my grandfather had been blacklisted. So he didn't want to prove that he'd grown up, you know, with meetings in his living room and in this very political household because as far as he was concerned, that's kind of what ruined his parents' life. Because my grandfather had, in the 40s, he was an animator working for Walt Disney, and he was one of the leaders of the first animator strike. And not only was he fired for this, but he wasn't able to work as an animator after this because Disney testified against the strike organizers in front of the House of Un-American Activity. So I grew up with all these stories. A lot of it happened on car trips because we spent a lot of time driving to visit relatives in the States once it was less stressful to cross the border. My parents would talk about the strike at Walt Disney and they would explain why they made the choices they made.
Presenter asks
16:39You were seventeen when your mother suffered a series of devastating strokes. What's your predominant memory of the time?
Yeah, I remember really vividly watching her take her first steps with a walker very shakily, and I was on the other side of the glass and I hadn't sort of prepared myself for seeing her not being able to walk and I just passed out. I just fell down. How old was she? She was forty six. … I mean, in lots of ways, it was good. I was able to be useful. And we became instantly very close. And I learned how to be a caretaker after being completely self-absorbed and narcissistic. And I called on my teenage skills. I would put makeup on her, do her hair, do her nails. I did a lot of that kind of caretaking. And I don't know if she was just putting up with me.
Presenter asks
17:48In Montreal, there was a catastrophic event that rocked campuses around the world. Can you tell me what happened?
So this was 1989 and I was 19. And a gunman. Went into an engineering school in Montreal. He separated the men from the women. Then he gunned down 14 women, killed 14 women, and said, you're all a bunch of effing feminists. And this was because apparently he believed that he had not been admitted to the school because of some kind of gender-based affirmative action. So he had a narrative in his mind that he had been discriminated against, and he took it out on women. … It was the moment where I could no longer be this apolitical teenager because you had to call yourself a feminist. You know, we walked around with pins saying, you know, I'm a effing feminist. And yet, the coverage immediately was, he's a madman, it's a random act, don't politicize the disaster. And I felt the need, and I was not alone, to make the case that, you know, no, you are not going to treat this as if it has no political context. And so we put up a poster that just said, you know, we're going to have a meeting to talk about the Montreal massacre. And we thought maybe 12 people would show up. And 500 people showed up. I just suddenly found myself chairing the meeting. I had a language, I had skills because I'd grown up with this, so some of it kind of came naturally to me.
Presenter asks
31:12Are you optimistic?
I guess I'm less optimistic that we are going to do what's necessary in the face of the climate crisis than I was a year ago. And I wasn't optimistic. I just thought our chances were better. But that makes it more important to become a more humane society. That increases the urgency to decide whether or not we actually believe that human life has value. So I feel like despair is a luxury and still at it.
“I'm not a big marcher. Writing was always my tool.”
“He's the one who taught me to look for the dirt behind the shine.”
“If the price of admission to having a critical analysis is our own perfection, then we're going to have a movement of three.”
“I don't think that books change the world. I really do believe that movements change the world.”
“Despair is a luxury and still at it.”