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b'Across the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles. As environmental collapse threatens, the journalist Noah Gallagher Shannon explores the lessons in sustainability that can be learned from looking \\u201cat smaller, perhaps even less prosperous nations\\u201d such as Uruguay.\\n\\n\\u201cThe task of shrinking our societal footprint is the most urgent problem of our era \\u2014 and perhaps the most intractable,\\u201d writes Shannon, who explains that the problem of reducing our footprints further \\u201cisn\\u2019t that we don\\u2019t have models of sustainable living; it\\u2019s that few exist without poverty.\\u201d\\n\\nTracing Uruguay\\u2019s sustainability, Shannon shows how a relatively small population size and concentration (about half of the country\\u2019s 3.5 million people live in Montevideo, the capital) had long provided the country with a collective sense of purpose. He also shows how in such a tight-knit country, the inequalities reach a rapid boil, quoting a slogan of a Marxist-Leninist group called the Tupamaros: \\u201cEverybody dances or nobody dances.\\u201d\\n\\nLooking for answers to both a structural and existential problem, Shannon questions what it would take to achieve energy independence.'