 This second in a technocritical review trilogy might seem unrelated to the previous book on the Luddites, and yet it provides the same kind of criticism from a completely different angle, that of eco-psychology, and the trauma that the modern lifestyle creates from many of those subject to it. I could spend half an hour or more reviewing the depths of this book, here I'll just touch on its technological criticism. From the late 1980s, much of my work involved acting for poor communities, subjected to pollutant developments, or plans to make such. When I read cellist Glenn Dilling's When Technology Wounds, it was reminiscence of the people I was working with. When I got a copy of this new book, I expected something similar, but was surprised by how different it was. Healing is a process of rounding up all the fragments and reconciling them. There are among us today people of the most admirable intention, who still, naively, fracture the hole, believing that plastic can still be produced, that the high-tech armors are here forever, that mass technological societies the fate are complete. According to such thinking, healing is a compromise. What healing we need for adjusting to our technological encasement can be accomplished by support groups, through some near entrepreneurship, or a new age workshop. In the 1990s the environmental movement professionalised, tactically ditching its fundamental demands to gain political influence, and corporate largesse, to achieve minor reforms. This is also the reason I work for communities directly, and not for one of those groups. From this more radical perspective, Glenn Dilling's ideas rang true. Ultimately, authentic recovery from western civilisation must include every fragment of our collective shattering, not just our self-esteem and where we dump the garbage, but how we structure our communities, how we speak and make decisions, what artefacts we create and who creates them, and how all of these facets of our lives fit together. This is one of the first books I read that clearly explained the basis for a non-western worldview, not in terms of some analgesic spiritual practice to be appropriated for the weekend, but of an all-encompassing way of looking at the Earth, which should form the heart of our daily interactions with the world around us. Western philosophy teaches us to think of the natural world as a neutral or dead background, to the foreground of our all-important human activity. Even environmentalists sometimes perceive the Earth as that thing out there that has to be saved so that human existence can go on. In the nature-based world, the Earth is a source of all sustenance, the beginning and end of all life, the whole of which we are part. This is a pretty average part of the eco-dialogue today, but around 1996 it caused me to rethink how modernity's compartmentalisation of the world is part-mentalising people too, and how that restricted the options for real change. Under this perspective, the environmental movement was not an agent for radical change, but merely a distraction perpetuating the system it claimed to oppose. To move beyond that, we had to stop seeing the world as other, and instead worked to habitually reconnect ourselves to its living processes. The fence was the ultimate symbol of this development. What came to reside within its confines, the cereals, cultivated flowers, permanent housing were said to be tame, to be valued, controlled and identified with. What existed outside, weeds, weather, the woods, was wild, perennially threatening human survival, to be feared, scorned and kept at bay. This dichotomy has since crystallised and come to define our lives with the myriad of fences separating us from the wild world and the myriad of fence-like artefacts and practices we have come to accept as the way things are. Given my other work in the 1980s and 1990s, many of asked why I didn't pursue my talents as a computer hacker. My response to that question, well, the answer that makes sense to me is, I did far too much backpacking. I was raised around garden vegetable patches and allotments, and as I grew older, I spent more time in the countryside. Coming from a family of engineers, I also played with engines and electronics, which meant I became wrapped up in the late 70s micro-computer boom at an early age. Perhaps for this reason, I felt the other that the book describes, that prime was scream for natural connection quite starkly. Most of us have known the elliptical connectedness of the natural world, if only for a moment. Most of us have known times of such centredness that we were dare to declare ourselves whole, and our consciousness has, upon occasion, cracked open to extraordinary perception. But then, typically, we return to the encased isolation our society proposes as reality, and with our date books and our digital clocks in hand, we remain there until the next momentary visitation. These elusive twinklings are comparable to the flashbacks that trauma survivors endure, repressed events shrieking for recognition, unexpected and unannounced. This was one of the first books to challenge the dichotomy of my life within technological society. It made me choose the reality I wanted to exist within, a process best described as a work in progress. When I took time to focus on these ideas, the book didn't tell me anything I didn't already perceive. It simply gave those perceptions form, and let me say this out loud. Almost three decades from its publication, this is a book that still needs to be read today. It still has a place within the debate on change, to allow people to look inwards with a fresh perspective at how the technological world endures through the trauma it creates. And why letting go of its alienating worldview is the most effective means to shed that pain.