Naomi Klein’s book is such a tour de force that it’s really great of you to focus on five takeaways.

I was most taken by locals resisting new technologies, knowing full well fracking was not good for their place, their landscape and community. Advocates for climate restoration know that technology and fast-talking salesmen, a.k.a. experts, got us into this mess. And yet, they believe new inventions, high-tech, will bring salvation, that is improve their quality of life. Scientists in secular black regalia have replaced priests in white. The climate is not separate from the earth. The climate started to go out of balance with the hoe and plow, a new technology introduced 8,000 years ago. We started chopping up vegetation, eliminating carbon uptake from photosynthesis. We turned up and exposed the soil to oxidize, die, and gas out carbon and methane. The Fertile Crescent in the mid-East and the Sahara turned to sands. Weather and the climate changed. Atmospheric carbon rose with decreasing carbon capture by plants. With industrialization not only came more emissions, came more impervious surfaces replacing vegetation that pulled carbon out of the air, replaced with heat sinks disrupting water cycles. It’s a like a terrible magician’s trick where we are told to look to the climate and the easily measured carbon dioxide levels. While ignoring the more life-giving and very complex carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles. It’s not linear thinking, what’s to blame. It’s holistic, systems-thinking. Not a slip of hand, but a slip of perspective. The problem is in how we mismanaged the land. How dumb we’ve become. Lost is knowledge of how we are integral parts of healthy ecosystems. We are totally enamored with technology and ignore our relationships with nature at our peril. Responsible stewardship in concert with nature changes everything for the better.