There's a lot of fascinating neurology and anthropology and linguistics and history in this book, but the meta-story is what really affected me, in reading. It's a story about how immensely capable humans are of creating and destroying knowledge. A dramatic advance in understanding brain functions followed by the revelation of how smartphone and GPS use degrade those functions. Incredible engineering of transportation technology like planes and automobiles, and how the burning of fuel to move them is destroying the homes and culture of Pacific island canoe builders. Progress in Western science and how racism narrowed those scientists' concept of "science" so tightly that they wrote off the empirical methods of indigenous peoples as animalistic instinct. Above all the story of tens of thousands of years of knowledge obliterated by colonial violence, one culture's deep understanding of their environment destroyed within a couple generations by another culture's self-righteous idea of progress.

And on a purely individual level, our capacity to learn wayfinding but forget it when we give ourselves mental shortcuts. If you spend a lot of time on a phone or computer (or with your face in a book such that you have to glance up disoriented and search for landmarks to tell you what bus stop you're at, because you've tuned out the stop announcing voice) but didn't grow up with them, you've probably had some moments of noticing your diminished capacity to wander aimlessly or figure things out on your own, and it's validating to read about that without a scolding tone.

It's a lot to take in, and it says a lot about how our relationship to the earth we live on makes us human. Excellent balance of typical science reporting and a generous extension of "science" to those whose wisdom has only recently been recognized as such by the Western establishment. It's a book with a lot of human ingenuity to marvel at and a lot of cruel losses to mourn and rage at.