A great book that needs to be discussed more. Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read this book. I highly recommend reading it.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

What I liked:

So, one thing this book gets right is it identifies that the left loves to fight with itself over how to solve problems. It's counter-productive and usually leads to groups feeling disconnected to each other and unable to access resources from one another.

Another thing the book gets right is instead of just explaining that settlers of European descent and Indigenous people have different perspectives to climate change, the author actually goes to some trouble to describe what that really means. To me, this was a big takeaway from the book, because as dumb as this might make me sound, it hadn't occurred to me that the reason for approaching climate change differently was not just because of history and resource scarcity but also because of viewing the land in a fundamentally different way.

What I didn't like:

I found it difficult to get as much out of this book as I feel I could have, because it was very repetitive. The writing style was hard to get into because I felt I was presented with the same information and opinions over and over in slightly different ways.

While I respect that the author really wanted to let people's voices shine through, the overwhelming amount of resources used for this book were interviews with members from indigenous communities across Canada. By the end of the book I felt I might have been better served by a book that compiled a series of essays written by the people being interviewed in the book, rather than the interviews being portioned out in sections of the book.

Thoughts overall:

There are some important messages in the book. It's also true that the more people that get on board with meaningful change in terms of climate action, the better. However, this isn't a book I would tell someone to read unless I knew that person was having issues understanding why indigenous communities tend to take a different approach to fighting climate change than non-indigenous people.