•  "All this useless knowledge", and "Some questions will ruin you if you're denied the answer long enough". The 'doesn't need or want to know everything' Vs the scienfitic nature of exploring and being human. The tempation of the unknown. The waste of life and accumalated knowledge from the explorers. There is beauty in the uncertain, things we cannot understand and will never be able to.
•  I loved the writing dedicated to the beauty of nature, the beauty of solitude, and the peace found within exploration and losing yourself. Even the explorers not having a name didn't seem dehumanising in Area X, but liberating. 
• I loved the unsettling nature of organic beings, e.g. the Biologist's
  luminesence
  , the
  doppelgangers
  , the moaner, the
  crawler
  the dying
  psychologist
  the writing on the wall
  "Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be..."
• There were clear themes of climate change, observation vs interference, and creeping physical and mental boundaries.  Mirroring, assimilation, remaking, copying. I liked learning about the Biologist's childhood swimming pool and her rockpool work. 
• I found the use of
  hypnotic suggestion
  intriguing.

"The book is completely fascinating and unlike anything I've ever read. The tone is eerie and unsettling in a way that sneaks up on you; because the protagonist is so matter-of-fact, there's a delay before the disturbing nature of what she's relating registers with the reader. Full of mystery, much of it unresolved, although I imagine that's what subsequent books in the series are for. I don't even know how to describe this book in a meaningful way; it reminds me of how it feels to meet literature for the first time from a culture I don't know. Parts feel familiar or "normal," and then other parts are jarringly, shockingly unknown in the way they reveal a different perspective that I didn't know existed. Worth reading again, and I think I might almost like it better in hardcopy rather than audiobook. The narrator did a great job with the matter-of-fact tone, but I wanted to go back and reread parts and see it visually on the page to get the full impact." 

• There was an explicit discussion about someone (globally, a people) will 'lose out' no matter what the method is to combat climate change. e.g the green rewilding approach or technological intervention geoengineering approach. The question was who/how to decide which are the right areas and people ot 'lose out' e.g. flooding or drought.
• The book did highlight the devastating changes already happened to the enviornment and the related technological advances (unbearable heat and the use of 'Earthsuits' for example, extensive flooding etc.) but it glossed over the hardship and suffering of millions. Even Red's story with the feral pig felt far removed from the climate crisis.
• There was a whole chapter confirming that the sulphur gun could never produce the same power of effect as volcano Mount Pinatubo that it is modelled off. Is this not commentary that the most powerful actor is always nature, not human intervention? It gives credibility to the green approach of rewilding (trees, peat bogs, ocean protection) rather than building machines to artifically do these tasks. There's another clear example of this later in the book where Eagles are demosntrated as superior to drones. Yet another example of organic nature being superior to man made imitations.
• The book illustrated the pervasiveness of the industrial military complex through Lachs and Red. Using working class bodies, usually directionless men, for the motivations of higher powers.
• Through describing the carnarge that deploying a pinch (EMP device) the book showcased the drastic limitations of depending upon interconnected technology (chips, internet). It demonstrated that over-reliantness on technology could lull people into a dangerous sense of complacency.
• There was a pretty explicit criticism of current neoliberal American culture through Red's monologue about how Komanchis are now all Americans e.g. now they're out of control, crazy, love individualism othering others and violence. "This country's a mess". 
• There was an interesting philosophical question that wasn't explored. "Should you do the thing even if you can't keep control of it?" e.g. when TR asked should his grandfather have built the mine or not? The answer could be yes or no, perhaps the detail is in the method? I would have liked to have seen this discussed properly. 
• There was an excellent scene where Saskia (trapped safe underground in the sulphur gun) light candles as an illustration of the direct threat of CO2 emissions in the climate emergency (the candles would burn up all of the CO2 in the room and they would suffocate so requires cooperation and agreement of the entire group to not burn the candles). Whilst at the same time, there were people above ground taking direct action though acting in their national or personal interests (India, America, individuals).
• There was a huge amount of blurb on geopolitics and history. Boiled down, it comes to colonialism, and global communications (human cooperation) problems. 
• Other forms of pollution were briefly touched upon such as noise pollution from the donic boom of the sulphur gun
• Darinda touched upon the racism and classism that military uses for expendable people, such as Sikhs (Lachs) I found it sad that
  he died from radiation
  . Did he really believe in this cause? Did he do the right thing by his 5ks? Probably yes, since he did least harm to the lives he knew he had the ability to have an impact upon. I think we could have beenfitted from more insight into Lachs and less into Saskia. 
• Bonus! I actually liked learning about performative warfare 

• "There's more to being a warrior than killing", ideas of hierachy, respect for others, lenience, selflessness
• Warning against blind loyalty to authority or a leader (shown via Tigerclaw and his favourite warriors)
• Ideas of engaging in mutal aid during day-to-day (elders) and crises (the flooding of riverclan territory)
• Teaching kids not to eat unknown berries outside - they could be poisonous!
• Disability ethics and realities in the wild, e.g. Cinderpaw's usefulness to the clan with her physical disability, the perceived earned retirement of the elders through their usefulness as warriors or Queens [child rearing]
• The arbitrariness, emotions, and reasons linked to blood relations vs chosen relations (shown through Cloudkit, Fireheart, Yellowfang, Bluestar and her children) - My only frustration at the book here is the lack of recognition that in the wild intermingling would be encouraged to diversify the gene pool.
• Ideas of human interference and disturbance of nature, e.g. the pollution of the river, the danger to life the thunderpath (roads) are without animal-friendly infrastructure facilitating crossing, climate change caused by human activity impacting the wildlife.

"We live in a cultural landscape that regards visibility alone as a sign of change. If more Black poets are getting published, recieving institutional largesse, editing, performing and otherwise taking up space, this must mean the work is almost done. I contend that the work of these landmark volumes set out is merely in its infancy. The radicalism in these volumes was to show black life as normal rather than a deviation from the norm of whiteness."

"The ambition of the poems collected in these pages, are not the product of some overnight sensation [in response to the BLM movement] . They are the product of community, ingenuity, and persistence in the overwhelming pressures to the contrary".

• Jason Allen-Paisant - birdsong
• Raymond Antrobus - for cousin John 
• Dean Atta - two black boys in paradise
• Janette Ayachi - quick fire, slow burning 
• Dzifa Benson - Ms hipson the tall Dutch woman, dreams of dancing with a man tall enough to make her feel delicate (excerpt from: Fair: natural born, man made, and fake.)
• Malika Booker - points of this reckoning 
• Eric Ngalle Charles - Mboa Mi: my country and a Song for freedom
• India Ellams - the vanishing 
• Samatar Elmi - Etymologies, "reduced to shades of echoes  between the wings of moths" 
• Khadijah Ibrahiim - Herman avenue hand cart woman 
• Keith Jarrett - nor the arrow that flies in the day
• Anthony Joseph - "we has names that we moved through space like blades". Wire, god of Wallerfield.
• Safia Kamaria Kinshasa - slow whine
• Vanessa Kisuule - Auntihood
• Rachel Long - neither tbh, probably your daddy ain't rich 
• Adam Lowe - aftermath
• Nick Makoha  - "those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it". None really, probably The long duration of a split second. 
• Karen McCarthy Woolf - from, unsafe
• Momtaza Mehri - a comparative history of fire
• Bridget Minamore - golden shovel for my people
• Selina Nwulu - Mango tree, and When the party is over
• Gboyega Odubanjo - arrangements
• Louisa Adjoa Parker - you're
• Roger Robinson - gold , and Aba Shanti Soundsystem
• Denise Saul - the room between us 
• Kim Squirrel* - Walking home from school and Healing
• Warsaw Shire - midnight in the foreign food isle 
• Rommi Smith - none really, only one pallette  for a portrait of little Richard.
• Yomi Sode* - on fatherhood: proximity to death, all of them! 
• Degna Stone* - another tongue and, how to unpick the lies 
• Keisha Thompson* - the concrete square off tib street in may, number 2020 (amazing)
• Kandace Siobhan Walker - "what could be worse than social rejection? Dare you to ask the moon is she knows she's just a reflection." Eye contact
• Warda Yassin - Treetop Hotel
• Belinda Zhawi - Tchaikovsky's January, "this body is the only thing I own" 

1. Introduction
2. Part 1 Global Struggle - essays from various activists in the global south, focussing on local activism againist capitalist extractivism
3. Part 2 Debates in the movement - directed critique of "How to blow up a pipeline" and broader eco-socialism theory (typically authored by activists in the global north)
4. Part 3 It is on utopia we now depend - More general essays perhaps leaning more towards hope and the future, also Malm offers his rebuttal here.

This, paradoxically, is the problem with How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It answers a different question than its title poses—not how one could blow up a pipeline, but why one should. But “why” is an easy question to answer.

It is much harder, however, to make the case that doing so would lead to meaningful, and immediate, decarbonization. Instead of attempting it, Malm counters the moralistic case for nonviolence with a moralistic case for property destruction. 

1. Most activists from the Global North and the Global South agree that a diversity of tactics are required in order to resist Capitalism, climate collapse, and build a sustainable more equitable future.
2. Most activists from the Global North and the Global South agree that solidarity and mutal aid between different activist groups across the globe are essential to achieve this goal.  Most pressing is the matter of organisation.

"These are starkly posed debates, but they should be: any democratic movement should be contentious and difficult. In the words of civil rights luminaries Bernice Johnson Reagon and Ella Baker, if you feel comfortable working in your activist coalition, you’re not really working in a coalition. And this is a struggle in which we need everyone to be involved."

"His audience is the mainstream environmental movement, people who have never considered sabotage, or direct action, people who are outright against it. For such an audience, Malm’s book is an important intervention. But I also hope that his audience will understand that the climate movement should not act in a void, and that in order to achieve lasting gains, it must act in dynamic relation to frontline direct action. There they will find communities who uplift a diversity of tactics; act with ingenuity and humility; make systems to protect each other from repression; support escalating action with clarity, spontaneity and integrity; and most importantly, have the fortitude to face the aftermath together."

"There’s a deeper question here: How wide is the scope of human agency? Humanity has proved itself powerful enough to change the climate at a planetary level, to spark off chains of extinctions and to permeate wildernesses with microplastics. But this was inadvertent, even if the destruction has been prolonged by its beneficiaries. Whether human beings have the collective capacity to intentionally reverse this planetary effect isn’t clear."

"This is also a theory based on the idea that the movement, workers, and ordinary people don’t recognize the legitimacy of taking power into their own hands, which is exactly what capitalists do. There has been an ideological domestication of society, which proposes that the only loci for legitimacy are bourgeois institutions and formal liberal democracy."

"Malm and the collective are no doubt right that ecological and anti-fascist causes coalesce with every fraction of a degree of warming. Their hesitance in recommending a course of action, though, might be the last symptom of the political difficulty charted in the book: nobody is sure what balance of intransigence and realism is needed, or even which of the traditional methods of mobilization might motivate governments to act at the scale required, in the time required."

"Malm is not merely a green provocateur but an eco-Marxist: he insists that ecological rescue cannot occur without social emancipation. No great and decisive number of people can be expected to seek the salvation of the climate unless it simultaneously implies the betterment of their own lives. This is, of course, the insight that lies behind ideas of a Green New Deal: the proposition that ecological rescue of the planet could also entail economic rescue of the population at large." 

"Many Indigenous peoples value what is best described as kinship. Kinship codifies relationality between human and nonhuman life, such as the insect nations, water beings, wildlife nations and the land itself." 

"Identity plays a big role in the climate struggle, and it is important to know what your privilege and power are under a white supremacist colonial regime. Solidarity and alliance are essential to movement building and a movement’s maintenance. This includes solidarity with the Global South and the rest of the world fighting colonial empires, extractive industries and imperialists. Our liberation is tied to one another. What created the problem will never resolve it."

"The problem now is, rather, we’re going to have to do without certain things that have been taken for granted, particularly in the core capitalist economies. Your shops are full, with food from all over the world. That’s not going to be the case so much. You’re not going to find it as easy to travel about by air, if at all. Certain capitalist freedoms, specifically capitalist freedoms, have got to go. The right is going to find a way to say, “This is a project for taking stuff away from you.” How can we confront honestly the fact that, yes, we’re going to have to give up some things—in the same way for example that, as Gilroy points out, anti-slavery activists in the eighteenth century said, “We’re not going to eat sugar, because there is blood in your sugar; it’s made by slaves”—we’re going to have to give up some things just to survive. How can we do that without it being entirely a net loss? What is potentially attractive in the eco-future?"

"Malm does not ask how effective disruptions of fossil infrastructure will affect ordinary people through price rises on essential goods. And so, he does not pose the question of how to avoid resistances and ambivalences stemming there from."

"The tragedy of the present, for Malm, may be expressed with a paraphrase of a tired old adage: it is easier to imagine the end of human civilization than the end of the capitalist state. In short, Malm’s war communism isn’t a strategic proposal as much as an exercise of the imagination: just think of what we could do with the state if we somehow controlled it. This imaginary is, Malm argues, necessary: it is, and with this I agree, hard to imagine “an actual transition” without “some coercive authority” to forcibly end the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. "

"The land does not belong to anyone, we belong to it."