Earlier this month, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein released their new documentary film about the global struggle for climate justice, This Changes Everything, based largely on Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. the Climate. As it happened, the film’s release coincided with the publication of another book by a Nationcontributor, Wen Stephenson’s What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice (much of which originated inThe Nation, and which was excerpted in the October 26 issue). With two projects so closely related, and so closely connected to The Nation, appearing at the same moment, it seemed like an occasion for a dialogue. Stephenson exchanged e-mail with Lewis and Klein last week, and what follows here is their correspondence. ...

Which is why we helped launch the Leap Manifesto in Canada, where we live. Emerging from an historic coalition of movement groups across sectors and silos—endorsed by First Nations leaders from the Tar Sands and Black Lives Matter Toronto, migrant rights and anti-poverty groups, big Labor and small business—the manifesto argues that to respond to this crisis we need to move from small-scale solutions to big, ambitious policies. And we outline them: not just moving to 100 percent renewable energy within two decades, not just massive investments in zero-carbon housing and transit, but a vast expansion of the entire existing low-carbon economy—the caregiving economy. Healthcare, education, daycare, the arts, and public interest media.

This is the policy expression of the ringing slogan of the People’s Climate March: to change everything, we need everyone. We’re convinced that to build a movement big enough to take on both austerity and extractivism, we need to lead with an inspiring vision of the world we want—one that will deliver huge benefits to the majority of people, that will solve multiple crises at once.