Yardley calls it a "measured but passionate and immensely important book."

Publishers Weekly describes it as "devastating ... alarming ... impressive ... vivid ..."

There are times when the capacity of mankind to blind itself to plain reality is simply breathtaking.

...

Wishful thinking tells me that perhaps this time the call will be heard. Experience teaches another, and far gloomier, lesson.

See also the recent post on The Idols of Environmentalism:

When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Jonathan Yardley, on the new book by Callum Roberts