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A review by ansemanco
This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World by Sarah Wilson
1.0
As someone who works directly in the climate and conservation movement, this book felt very surface-level. There was a lot of self-righteousness disguised as "easy, simple living" and a lot of shaming language that felt immature and uninformed. The author seemed very concerned with fixing everything (and implied that the solutions were incredibly simple — just don't use a disposable coffee cup!) but very unwilling to hold sacred space and acknowledge the complexity of capitalism, climate change, cultural differences, etc.
The scope of the book was also much too broad and gave this surface skim of the world's ills (that we're all already aware of) without diving deeply and posing stories and descriptions that might cause us to pause and think constructively about any of it.
I just couldn't shake the undertones of arrogance, self-righteousness, and refusal to meet people where they're at, as well as the implication that no one else was thinking about these things or concerned about these issues, or changing their life as much as the author to address it. It just really belittled the decades of work professionals in this space have been doing and took on the tone of, "How has no one thought of this before?!" We have thought of it. We're working tirelessly on it. And saving your chicken bones from your meals out to make broth is most definitely not the solution we all somehow stupidly missed.
The scope of the book was also much too broad and gave this surface skim of the world's ills (that we're all already aware of) without diving deeply and posing stories and descriptions that might cause us to pause and think constructively about any of it.
I just couldn't shake the undertones of arrogance, self-righteousness, and refusal to meet people where they're at, as well as the implication that no one else was thinking about these things or concerned about these issues, or changing their life as much as the author to address it. It just really belittled the decades of work professionals in this space have been doing and took on the tone of, "How has no one thought of this before?!" We have thought of it. We're working tirelessly on it. And saving your chicken bones from your meals out to make broth is most definitely not the solution we all somehow stupidly missed.