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Book Review Essay: The Environmental Crisis and Its Capitalist Roots: Reading Naomi Klein with Karl Polanyi * —Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

According to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2014 report on our ‘‘ecological footprint,’’ humanity is currently using the earth’s resources 50 percent faster than they can be replenished. In the United States, that rate is nearly 600 percent. And the best evidence suggests that we have only years, not decades, to restore the balance before we tip the planet’s natural systems into irreversible cycles that will wreak havoc on vast swathes of nature and on the lives of billions of people around the world. Klein’s book marshals evidence for this prognosis and offers a diagnosis and a strategy for responding, though her diagnosis is somewhat blurred. At some points, she claims that the root cause of this environmental crisis lies in the capitalist character of our economy. But at other points she indicts not capitalism as such but rather its neo-liberal variant, and at yet other points she attributes the crisis to an ‘‘extractivist mindset.’’ This blurred diagnosis is problematic because such different diagnoses point to very different remedies. Polanyi (2001) offers a theory of capitalism that helps us decide among the alternative diagnoses. Polanyi’s argument supports an indictment of capitalism as such rather than its currently dominant neo-liberal variant or an extractivist mindset. This radical-critical edge in Polanyi’s argument has been largely blunted as his work has been absorbed into management studies, in particular by the way our field has misunderstood his concept of embeddedness. Restoring that edge to Polanyi’s argument and then reading Klein’s book through these lenses leads us to a theoretically grounded diagnosis and from there to a possible remedy—along with some other, far darker possible scenarios for our future.