Roberto Garachana

This book should be required reading. One of my favorite books. As a Zillenial, one of my first field trips in public school was to a recycling plant. The climate crisis is not hard to understand and is something most people are conscious of or sympathetic to, even if we don’t act on it regularly. Saito manages to connect this one issue that is one of the least polarizing I can imagine, and relate it to so many other issues that are much more so: capitalism, the military industrial complex, imperialism. Through historical analysis and data driven research he manages to prove how this is the case. He then gives us the answer to said crises, and that’s socialism or communism. There’s some jargon in here that may pull some readers away from the point, but all in all I think this is an incredibly important book that I plan to spread as far as possible to as many people as I can. By showing how so many of the causes we care for, as well as the most unifying cause (the climate crisis) are all interconnected, he makes it clear as day that it’s in all of our best interest to oppose capitalism however we can.

This book can be boiled down to “here’s all the ways people ruin their own lives, nothing you can do about it 🤷‍♀️.” An incredibly fatalistic, irresponsible and frankly privileged stance to take. The overall theme of the book, “the environment is delicate and we’re at the mercy of it” is harmful to the world. It neglects political/personal responsibility on humans in how we interact with, care for and/or abuse our environment. The decisions to irresponsibly continue abusing the environments of many of the societies talked about in this book were exactly that, decisions. Governing bodies chose to act this way/allow these actions, and the masses followed along because the economic and political climates of their societies forced them to, lest they be left with no means to provide for themselves. While there is a clearly a lot of education and thought put into this book, there is also a very deliberate neglect to the real cause of these collapses: bad government. .