Roberto Garachana

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. .