Biography
Naomi Klein was born in Montreal in 1970 to American parents who had moved to Canada in opposition to the Vietnam War. She came to international attention in 2000 with No Logo, a study of brand culture and sweatshop labour that became a defining text of the anti-globalization movement and has been published in more than 35 languages.
Her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism argued that free-market policies are repeatedly imposed on populations in the disoriented aftermath of crises — coups, wars, storms, financial collapses. It reframed how a generation of organizers understood the relationship between catastrophe and privatization. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate followed in 2014.
Klein is the tenured UBC Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia and founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. In 2018 she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers, where she remains an Honorary Professor of Media and Climate. She writes a column for The Guardian.
Her 2019 book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal made the intellectual case for the policy framework that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez carried into national politics — and she wrote publicly in defense of the realism of Sanders's climate plan during the 2020 campaign. Her most recent book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), is a study of conspiracy culture and political doubling. End Times Fascism — and the Fight for the Living World is due September 15, 2026.
Work & Influence
More than any other writer, Klein supplied the intellectual architecture linking climate breakdown to economic structure — the argument that you cannot solve one without confronting the other. That argument is the foundation of the Green New Deal, and it runs through the platforms of nearly every candidate on this site.
Her work on disaster capitalism has become a standard analytical tool on the left for reading everything from post-hurricane school privatization to pandemic profiteering. Her writing on Palestine, including the standalone Doppelganger excerpt Israel, Palestine, and the Doppelganger Effect, has been widely circulated in the movement.
Klein is a co-founder of The Leap and has spent three decades connecting academic analysis to on-the-ground organizing — insisting throughout that communities on the front lines of climate disruption, in the Global South and at home, are the actual climate justice leaders.
In the press
- NaomiKlein.org
- NaomiKlein.org
- UBC
- Substack