Naomi Klein: 'We shouldn’t be surprised that kids are radicalised'

With How to Change Everything, the activist has written her first book for young people. She explains how she has been inspired by a new, very young generation of protesters

When Naomi Klein toured North America with her 2019 book about the Green New Deal, she and her assistant liaised with local campaigners from the Sunrise Movement. This youthful climate action group was organised to set up a table at each event, with petitions and actions, so audiences could become activists, right there. When they reached Palo Alto, they discovered that the Sunrise Movement contact they'd been bossing about" was a 13-year-old, who was organising the whole thing between her classes.

This shock inspired Klein, who began her activism in her 20s with the anti-corporate bible No Logo, to write her first book specifically for young people. How to Change Everything joins a burgeoning library of new books seeking to mobilise a new generation: alongside the iconoclastic Jay Griffiths' Why Rebel, and youthful activist Hendrikus van Hensbergen's How You Can Save the Planet, an excellent down-to-earth handbook for teens and pre-teens.