Some personal remarks by Naomi Klein: immersing herself into the international climate justice
movement had helped her to imagine various futures that were less bleak (grimmig) than the sort of
apocalypse she had come to imagine. Maybe, just maybe, there was a future where humans could
once again be part of a cycle of creation, not destruction.
So she got pregnant. But then her luck ran out: an ovarian tumor, and a miscarriage. After operations
and trying again she went through an ectopic pregnancy (buitenbaarmoederlijke zwangerschap), and
later through the ifv procedure, tll she gace lthat up. Then with the help of alternative treatment she
came to realise that she should relax (‘before you can take care of another human being you have to
take care of yourself’), and she went back to where she grew up and where her parents still live, took a
break, took long walks along a salmon river, and resigned herself to not having kids (though she
sometimes felt uncomfortable with all this talk of ‘leaving this earth tour children….’).
She went to see the agroecological center of Wes Jackson in Kansas. The lesson: respect fertility, keep
it going. But when humans started planting single crops that needed to be replanted year after year,
the problem of fertility loss began. The way industrial agriculture deals with this problem is well
known: irrigate heavily and lay on the chemicals, both to fertilise and to ward off pests and weeds,
even if these chemicals have been linked to health problems for humans and animals (bees).
Wes Jackson and his colleagues at the Land institute are breeding perennial (meerjarige) varieties of
wheat, wheatgrass, sorghum and sunflowers that do not need to be replanted every year, just like the