Author, editor, and community organizer Leah Bobet’s novels have won the Sunburst and Prix Aurora Awards; her short fiction is anthologized worldwide. She has reviewed books on climate and our relationships to place for PRISM International, Spacing, and Rewilding Magazine. She was poetry editor for Reckoning 5, read for Grist's Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest, and was the longtime editor of Ideomancer Speculative Fiction. She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds grassroots food security networks, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at www.leahbobet.com.
How can—or can’t—ideological political movements serve us in the climate crisis?
It’s a question which increasingly nags while reading Kohei Saito’s “degrowth communism” bestseller, originally published in Japanese as Capital in the Anthropocene (2020). In this new English translation, University of Tokyo Marxist philosopher Saito promises to “excavate a completely new, previously unexplored aspect of Marx’s thought” (p. 13), uncovering Marx as an early advocate of—and revolutionary guide to—climate action.
Unfortunately, Slow Down ends up more bait-and-switch than road map. A disorganized structure and disturbingly jaundiced view of human nature produce something between polemic and projected cry of despair, while Marx’s supposed climate advocacy ultimately boils down to one offhand reference in an unsent letter.
Slow Down’s troubles begin with its own fundamental confusion about which readers, precisely, it’s aimed toward. Billed as a manifesto for the casual reader, but built as an academic critique, it speeds through brief, vague examples of how capitalism and the Green New Deal fail; explains degrowth; rebuts other Marxist scholars on fairly technical points of interpretation; and finally offers a few entry-level proposals to slow global economies and climate change.
Saito gives accessible, lucid explanations of certain concepts—atmospheric composition, tipping points, the commons, and degrowth scholarship—but rarely analyzes or synthesizes any of them, instead summarizing and re-summarizing old material until his argument visibly grows thin. For general readers, it’s a minefield—especially given Slow Down’s tendency to propagandize and speak in absolutes.
Slow Down fields a lot of broad claims in its pages—but never quite enough reasoning to back them. Existing experiments like circular economies and negative emissions technologies are written off as “inadequate” by comparing them to historical colonialism—but without ever really unpacking why they’re similar. Goalposts are frequently moved: while it’s true that “recycling resources is, by itself, insufficient as a solution” (p. 76), so is any monolithic solution in a super-wicked problem, and dismissing mitigation tactics wholesale because they aren’t themselves a cure-all is alarmingly unserious.
Likewise, studies are sloppily read and then used as foundational to the book’s arguments: “Even if every country abided by the (Paris) Agreement,” Saito says, “there are signs that global temperatures would rise by 3.3 C anyway,” (p. 17) citing Reuters coverage of a Climate Action Tracker report which quite clearly names “currently implemented policies,” not the effect of Paris Agreement commitments. The original CAT report says that if planned projects and policies came into force—if policies and commitments aligned—”warming by 2100 could be limited to 3C.” A 2018 call for implementation of commitments and their efficacy—do the promised work, thanks—is recast as whistleblowers decrying the entire framework of the Paris Agreement as ineffectual and pointless (p. 17).
This looseness with logic and mischaracterized citations proves crucial. Having declared the Paris Agreement—a document with faults and positives—ineffectual, Saito ties it to economist William Nordhaus’s projections of a 3.5 C rise in temperatures and declares Nordhaus’s projections “a strategy for economists to raise their profile.” He then insinuates that because Nordhaus’s earlier numbers and the Climate Action Tracker report happen to be “close,” then of course the Paris Agreement is also cynical economist political theatre, and of course, “world governments would be inclined to privilege economic growth and put off dealing with the problem at hand” (p. 15-17). It’s conspiratorial thinking at best—misreading facts, misunderstanding causes and goals, and then patterning those distortions into conspiracies. At worst, it’s an active bad-faith attempt to destroy social trust in other solutions and corral readers into his own.
This is how Slow Down makes its case: a house built on proclamations and targeted attempts to discredit other ideas. The farther it goes, the shakier its logic starts to feel. Saito’s attempts to prevent this—classing these takedowns as “hard-to-hear” or “inconvenient truth” (p. 26, 76), and some pre-emptive social shaming—are a brittle defense.
That reflex to substitute thoughtful consideration with personal manipulativeness increasingly overtakes the book’s actual ideas. Saito takes pains to point out that he’s separating Marxist ideas from Soviet execution, and that modern Marxism comes in many flavours, but his analysis and rhetoric both seem stuck in authoritarian reflexes: foundationally assuming that realities are shaped by someone’s say-so alone; that all failures, institutional or personal, are deliberate, motivated, and luridly grotesque; and that the only way to change is by discarding bad-guy authorities and installing good-guy ones.
Saito appears convinced that anything a designated bad guy does can’t be just a wrong action but an active and deliberate betrayal. “We may well start to wonder if those calling for a Green New Deal truly believe in stopping climate change at all,” Saito exclaims, forgetting that sometimes people experiment with solutions rather than collude in full-scale social sabotage (p. 84). People buying fast fashion, he assumes, can’t be rushed, uninformed, underskilled, or any one of a constellation of factors feeding a global industry, each one a lever to reduce its harm if we’re organized and clever; they’re “consumers who want whole new wardrobes every season” to “satiate the[ir] unlimited desires” (p. 25). Every problem is the result of an enemy.
The result is a mindset which treats pointing out, discrediting, and personally caricaturing your enemies as how problem-solving works—as if large-scale social change is won by going birding for moral traitors. Slow Down can’t seem to grasp the idea of less extreme motivations: good faith in bad systems, objective or perceived limited options, or legitimate disagreements about process. It doesn’t seem to understand people.
Unfortunately, the worst of this blindness intersects with race. While it consistently acknowledges that the Global South faces harder climate impacts, Slow Down can’t seem to treat that vast, diverse region as more than the hapless class victim of the collective Global North, who must now be shamed into rescuing their victims. Solutions or climate initiatives from the Global South—of which plenty exist—are ignored beyond brief final-chapter namechecks, and Saito credits certain phenomena—the organizing strategies of agricultural communes, for example—to Marx instead of generations of campesino organizers.
While it’s true that the “periphery”—Saito’s term for the Global South—has taken disproportionate and generational environmental burdens from extractivism and colonialism, it’s still full of creative, capable people who use agency, strategize their lives, and make their own mistakes. Slow Down talks about listening, but occupies itself with abusing the enemies responsible for exploiting the Global South rather than citing or platforming those injured parties. It’s an ugly kind of objectification, and it leaves an aftertaste.
When we finally reach Saito’s proposed solutions, they’re mostly familiar to anyone who reads the news. He proposes curbing supply chain speculation, shortening workweeks, encouraging social ownership of public infrastructure, and prioritizing essential workers. After all that buildup, the pulpit rhetoric deflates into encouraging readers to sign petitions, participate in school strikes, and support organic farming. Saito’s “fresh” read of Marxism turns out to be the last casualty of Slow Down’s inability to see people in context. In a draft letter, Marx casually references a medieval German commune which designed economies against growth. Projecting his own rigid read of human motivations, Saito presumes that this society was deliberately Kohei Saito’s own personal, modern ideology, and that Marx’s mention of it is a coded sign of Marx having converted to degrowth.
And that’s it. Slow Down’s entire case for degrowth is that, according to one unsent letter blown up into a whole universe by Kohei Saito, it’s “Marx’s last wish.” I couldn’t stop imagining someone building a whole worldview off some of the letters I’ve never sent. When I picture that, my hands start to shake.
Something extremely queasy dwells in Slow Down’s rigid blindness to the fluidity of human motivations—Marx’s included. It’s the heart of the trouble in this book: its core beliefs about authority, solution, change, and choice. It can’t seem to shake an authoritarian conviction that we’re all helpless before the whims of monsters, or that positive change means holding a nightstick to someone else’s throat. It’s a relationship with authority and social trust that bluntly scares the shit out of me.
What’s sad is that I found so many of Saito’s more pragmatic statements sensible and obvious: we must use less; we must share social resources both locally and globally; mutual aid and restoring the commons are good, and disaster capitalism is abhorrent; a detransactionalized, more open-source society would be a better one. We agree on a great deal of what might work. But when I asked myself if I’d want to build that society with anyone who came to those conclusions through this book, I hesitated.
We are reading, speaking, and working on climate questions in a season when many climate seminars and activities begin with a grounding exercise. A baseline level of perpetual trauma is almost assumed. The crackling cognitive load of grief, fear, and precarity in these spaces is already intense.
As someone organizing locally on climate, I can’t help but read any call to arms as prefiguring the relations it’ll produce in the people who answer. How would Slow Down’s converts act once they enter climate work? Propaganda can lead people to your point of view, yes, but it affects what state they arrive in, what they track in with them, and how often you’ll have to sweep the proverbial floor.
It’s difficult to imagine this text’s projection, paranoia, incuriosity, casual objectification, and brittle analyses of both the world and the infinite human heart not rubbing off on how those people would work. When you berate people into virtue, mostly you’ve convinced a bunch of people that berating others is an actual day of work. As abolitionist scholar Danielle Sered writes, “no one enters violence for the first time by committing it”, and recruiting people with violence is a great way to reproduce it.
But almost worse is the impression that Slow Down fears you’ll do the right things for the wrong reasons. Tangled in the jealous one-upmanship of small ideological games for even tinier prizes, it seems terrified that even if you care about climate, you might care wrong: your worship feeding the wrong god. With wildfire smoke on the move and rivers flooding weekly this past summer here in Toronto, this is pettiness I can’t entertain.
Ultimately, Slow Down’s approach to force-grown epiphanies has led me to a more uncomfortable question: in what circumstances is this ideology-first approach actually useful in the climate project? This book has sold over 500,000 copies in Japan; it obviously appeals to somebody. But if Slow Down aims to mobilize an army, which part of this problem is shaped like a war? Is there a generative route to climate action here?
I didn’t walk away with an answer; I should very much like one. As noted at the beginning, I cannot find the reader: the person for whom this is the right book at the right time. Or more specifically, I can’t find the reader who, if they’re lost, would be made better by this approach. There are things of value in Saito’s desire to re-regulate our relationships with ecology. But how Saito gets there, how he insistently degrades and coerces his readers in the process, and what it means to come into a movement that is supposed to uplift and preserve life through a door made of panic, degradation, mistrust, and despair—all these make Slow Down a title I can’t in good faith recommend.
Slow Down and I are not having a disagreement about ideologies or institutions. We’re having a disagreement about people: their fundamental nature and worth, whether pain creates or destroys them, if and how authority owns them, and how we should come into relationship together to build a just world. It’s a disagreement I fear is irretrievable. Do I want more colleagues in creating a sustainable and just future? Hell yes. But I left Slow Down thinking I should prefer to meet them willing and whole.
To celebrate the official print release of Our Beautiful Reward on March 16th (virtual release party Sunday the 19th, you’re invited!), I asked some of the contributors a few of the questions foremost on my mind. It’s been too long since we’ve run many interviews here, and I’ve missed it; getting to know writers and how they think and feel has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Reckoning for me since the beginning. I hope their answers prove as englightening to you as they have been to me.
We’ve been posting one mini-interview a day. This one is the last—at least for now….
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?
Leah: In some ways, speculative fiction is the literature of consequences: it’s not much of a jump from what if? to if-then. And the question of personal freedoms, of bodily autonomy, strikes me as being fully a question about consequences. When you make the decision to restrict people’s intimate physical choices, what happens to their lives? What happens to their world as those individual consequences silt up and impact each other?
One of my favourite (and most frustrated!) questions in the past few years is: “And what did you think would happen five minutes after that?” and speculative fiction is sincerely a good place to play that consequence-modeling out. Not to scare people, not to go “it could happen to you!” but to think well. To show each other, in digestible format, what and how we’ve been thinking.
Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?
Leah: This month, Maude Barlow’s Still Hopeful: Lessons From a Lifetime of Activism. Barlow is a climate organizer who started in the 1970s Canadian women’s movement—at quite a high profile—and moved through that into free trade and water sovereignty issues; the book is a small condensation of what she knows about going the distance for a cause.
I was born just after women’s lives changed massively in Canada—higher awareness around domestic violence, wage gap legislation, and women having our own bank accounts—and I always find a lot of perspective in reading about the 1970s women’s movement, especially from people who didn’t stop there, but expanded their work from it. It helps me peel apart always from the world that had just started to happen when I was born, and see attitudes I’d assume were static as the result of motion—and deliberate action.
That reading helps me think about the rollback of rights happening now as the result of kinetic—and moveable—forces, too. Things that moved once can be moved again. It’s a way to rotate the problem: to look at the flood of daily horror stories as not inevitabilities, but calls to organize around each other’s needs and show up for each other.
I’m also keeping up with One Million Experiments, which is one of the million ideas Mariame Kaba’s involved in: a place to profile community-based projects that rethink what it means to keep each other safe. It’s a great space for looking up a model, seeing what you can get involved in, or feeling less alone with the work, because people are out there doing it. We’re doing it every day. There’s a reproductive justice section, and if anyone’s feeling stuck when it comes to community work, organizing, or just how to show up and do the thing with your colleagues, their podcast is excellent. It’s all you need to know about trying, failing, adjusting, and getting back up.
Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?
Leah: The project that’s getting most of my time right now is a 300-person mutual aid network that’s delivering home-cooked food to unhoused and underhoused people in downtown Toronto.
It’s pretty simple: in early 2021, a few people found out what hot or nourishing food unhoused and underhoused Torontonians actually want, and told a few friends, and so forth. We cook it at home on a weekly signup roster, and a small network of volunteer drivers brings it to the Seeds of Hope resource centre. People who need nourishing, hot food get fed—but more importantly, they get that weekly, persistent reminder that hello, we are here, we are a community, we care about them. They are not discarded. And those of us doing the cooking get that weekly, persistent reminder that we are a community too, and we aren’t helpless in the face of any of this. We can take care of each other. We are being constant for and with each other.
I’ve moved from cooking once every other week to being one of a core group of volunteers that’s come together to make this thing sustainable. We redesigned our backend and dropoff/delivery system this fall, cross-trained each other to share more responsibility together, and relaunched this winter. We’re looking at how we can work better with other mutual aid groups now.
I knew no one involved in this project before we started. They’re amazing people. I’m so glad I signed up.
Michael: That’s awesome! Thank you very much for these answers—and for doing that work.
The call for submissions for Reckoning 5’s poetry started as a scribbled note in a water-damaged notebook I lost years ago. It was Toronto labour rights activist and scholar Dr. Winnie Ng’s answer to a 2013 panel question on what she’d tell young organizers: that we can organize from rage, but where it was possible, you could go the long haul if you organized from joy. I lost the notebook, so I’m not going to get that quote right.
Living in a busy urban downtown sharpens your vision for the natural world living alongside and around you. You start relationships: with the raccoon that topples over your compost bin to eat tomato scraps; with the ash tree whose lowest leaves are low enough to, on the days you wear high heels to work, brush the top of your head like a benediction. You learn to truly value that ecosystem threaded through the cracks, and realize that busy spaces are full of half-visible mitzvot. You can think nobody is and then your vision sharpens to those little signs, and you realize: somebody is. That public native species garden didn’t grow itself, and those squirrels aren’t fat and happy on their own account. Someone planted chestnut trees. Someone is, just outside your frame of reference, doing the work.
Our call for poetry was about those intimacies: the seed waiting in your pocket, cupped handfuls of gorgeous things in motion, little gods. What work you were doing, and why you did it. Maybe we could all sharpen our vision, together.
We had no idea what was coming.
In Toronto, I have spent this pandemic year uneasily hibernating as part of a high-risk household. I stepped outside in May and the trees were leafing outward; the next time, in mid-June, the flowers were already going to fruit. It has been hard to know whose precautions to trust, where the future was leading.
Meanwhile, submissions poured in from every continent except Antarctica, and built a paper spine to keep my head up as the case counts fluctuated. Every week this year, I’ve spent a few hours reading poetry and essays about those little flecks of possibility: vivid, loving descriptions of the ground as wrinkled wise skin; laughing lines about coral; how far you can travel on patched-up sails; “we breathe and breathe and / breathe”. Ambivalent, pragmatic, realistic, joyous, fierce, those carefully nurtured loves started to feel like sonar, describing the shape of a world latticed with somebody is. Everything was most-beautiful. Webbed between chat servers, databases, and international video calls scheduled delicately to link three time zones—systems that felt like they should be so tenuous—what’s emerged is so solidly real.
Doing this project in a disrupted, unsettled year meant no matter what I could find to fear, somebody is. The process of putting this volume together gave us the proof. I can close my eyes and see a constellation: hundreds of people who believe in the limitless potential of being for something fiercely enough to write about it during a global pandemic.
That’s what I hope this offers you: a volume that holds the proof, that shakes with the force of that jotted-down note seven years ago, organize from joy. Even though the notebook got soaked until it was unreadable, was lost in a move, and I had to dig through old websites and event listings to find the conference and rediscover Dr. Ng’s name to properly credit her for the impact, I remembered the important part all the way through: If I love things and work from that love, my strength will not fail me.
So, here we are—not all of us, and not in equal circumstances: on our balconies, in wide-open spaces, in overcrowded housing with a half-dozen people we love, doing the work with our hands, doing the work with our mouths, holding ourselves or other people together, failing for today to do it, following instinct, following best practice, fumbling, planting, advocating, pushing back, pushing forward. Tending tiny miracles until they split the pavement.
For Reckoning 5, I’m looking for poems which move in concert with fiction editor Cécile Cristofari’s call for work that spotlights the moments of environmental beauty we’re living in right now, holding close to our hearts, or carefully cultivating in the back corner lot twice a day, on the way to and from the streetcar.
The little seed you’re carrying around, waiting to replant. The spaces cupped full of joy in motion. Something holy in your pocket; a little-god reminder of why we do the work and what’s worth working for. That which is coming. That which has been quietly growing all along. That which is beautiful amidst the noise—all seen through the lens of environmental justice.
I have a soft spot for formal poetry done in a way where your voice slips free, but would love to see your free verse, translations, little epics, concrete poetry, speculative poetry, all the things I couldn’t even think up right now to list, and most importantly, the unique texture of your own voice.
If you’re working in a form or tradition you aren’t sure I’ll culturally grasp: please, tell me about it in your cover letter. I’ll ask the followup questions necessary to meet you halfway.
I will consider exceptional work that falls slightly outside of the theme or spins it in unexpected ways as long as it stays firmly centred on the topic of environmental justice.
