This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quite simply: A very important book.

Yes, it does cover a lot of the same ground we're being smothered with -- the ongoing ecological disaster, the entrenchment of heartless capitalism, the seemingly insurmountable problem of mobilization when we're fighting with our own zeitgeist and fatalism -- but this nonfiction work has a one fantastic thing going for it.

It's extremely well-written and engaging. Deeply researched, polarizing, and fact-based. And when I say polarizing, I mean polarizing in the way we can choose either life... or death. This book is years old by now and new facts have only made our current situation even more damning, but the core is still as valid as ever.

There are still a lot of people hell-bent on trying to raid the treasure of the earth at the expense of destroying everything in their path. The profit motive is absolutely to blame. Regular people are stuck with no good choices, no valid alternatives, and everyone else is getting poisoned by fracking. And when I mean everyone, I mean all life.

We can't simplify this problem without ignoring the system that every part relies upon, and the system itself is failing at a faster rate than ever. It's not enough to see a tweet here or there or discover yet another massive abuse of power, trust, or might-makes-right, be it oil companies, globalization, dwindling resources, or capital itself.

This book does a fine job walking us down a great, wide path of our very much worsened problem. There is hope, too, but most of it boils down to ALL of us getting our act together, mobilizing the rest of humanity to just say NO to the looters, before we can make real change.

Mass movements DO make a big difference. Organization makes BETTER difference. We all need to work together. Post haste. Or do we want to discover a dead ocean next? How about the rest of our power failing with temperatures up to 56 C everywhere? Or how about the plain simple fact of poisoned water... everywhere.

We're looking at mass death. Either we get off the pot or we're gonna get flushed with the rest of the shit.

So. Yeah. It's a polarizing book. Do we want to live or die?

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