Dahr Jamail

There are a lot of interesting and valuable perspectives in this book, but I think I would've enjoyed it a great deal more if I'd experienced these interviews directly, maybe via podcast, instead of in print, where I often found it difficult to catch the tone and the rhythm of the speakers' stories and ideas.

I also would've loved to see a map of where the ancestral lands of the speakers lie in Turtle Island, since their perspectives about the land and Mother Earth find anchor in those places. There are also so many resources mentioned in the interviews—speeches, books, documentaries, etc.—that it would've been helpful to have those collected into a Resources or Further Reading section at the end of the book. But I am reading an ARC, so perhaps these things can be found in the final publication.

Overall, I'm grateful for the information shared in this book, and I hope to put a number of its perspectives into practice in my life. I can also think of a few other people who would benefit from exploring these interviews, and I look forward to discussing this with them.… (mehr)

Here was my initial review of this book:

"Sobering but refreshing read. Grieve and bear witness, that’s all that’s left to do."

It is easy to see that and imagine how one might be led down the path to an existential crisis. And that is *exactly* what happened. Between this book and "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace Wells, I did just that, lapsed into a crisis. Why bother to keep on living? Why care about the environment? It's all going to end with an uninhabitable planet, so recycling aluminum cans and plastic just seems like a big waste.

I'm not kidding when I say that it caused me to think of life as a complete waste of time, and that it was perfectly acceptable to just end it all.

Fortunately that did not happen. My general underlying positive viewpoint fought back. I did not want to see my beautiful wife lapse into this "we have ruined the planet and humans deserve to die off" mindset. I kept reading. And I found a couple of books that saved my sanity.

One was The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey.

The other was Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger.

Those books literally saved my life.

This isn't about being a so-called 'climate change denier' or whatever label you want to sling out. This is about approaching science with a bit of healthy skepticism, about rejecting the concept of consensus as it has *no place* anywhere near the idea of science. It is about regaining hope. It is about learning to care for the earth and our legacy on this planet.… (mehr)