Come to climate rally

Imagine Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein’s surprise when this self-described “secular, Jewish, feminist” received a call from the Vatican asking her to speak at a global climate conference there in July. Pope Francis had recently released his long awaited encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” and had been traveling the world with his clarion call for cessation of greed-based destruction of planet earth.

Last year, Ms. Klein published her essential and seminal book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” which is about to be followed by a documentary of the same name. Never lacking momentum, Ms. Klein has just co-authored “The Leap Manifesto, A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another,” which I hope will be taken up by grassroots movements for climate justice in every corner of the world. Where politicians have failed to lead, ordinary people must.

As it turns out, secular, Jewish Klein and the Pope share a deeply ethical analysis of capitalism as the root cause of the global climate crisis. In “Laudato Si,” the Pope writes, “Nature is filled with words of love, but how can we listen to them amid constant noise, interminable and nerve-wracking distractions, or the cult of appearances?” Ms. Klein, with no small measure of bewilderment, has aligned herself with this icon of faith: “If Pope Francis is correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model — and I think he is correct — then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.”