Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, offers a blunt statement of today’s central problem: “[O]ur economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.” The book, and a companion film directed by Avi Lewis planned for a 2015 release, should set the framework for an honest conversation about climate and culture, ecology and economics. Robert Jensen’s review of the book, which is online at Resilience.org, begins:

Naomi Klein has written a brave book that not only confronts the calamity of climate destabilization but also examines the deep roots of the crisis in the perverse logic of capitalism and the dehumanizing values of the “extractivist” high-energy/high-technology world.

Klein’s courage comes not in her reporting on the science and politics—there we get the exhaustive research and intellectual rigor that are her trademark—but in her simple plea that we not only think about all this and commit to act, but feel it as well.

Taking climate change seriously is not only about data and analysis but about anguish, and Klein is refreshingly candid about her own struggles with the grief that’s inevitable when we face the truth.

On the political front, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate takes on conservative climate-change deniers and the liberal climate-change minimizers. While both groups will no doubt accuse her of being alarmist, my only quibble runs in the opposite direction—Klein is too upbeat in her assessment of what is possible. But reasonable people can disagree on these hunches about where we’re heading. We’ll get to that after the science, economics, and social critique that are so urgently needed, and in those matters we are in good hands with This Changes Everything.

Read the full review at Resilience.org.