The Vanishing Earth a journey through the last days of abundance

A deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction. Humanity has remade the Earth with astonishing speed. In the last fifty years alone we have taken more out of the planet than in all prior history combined. Across every continent lie the immense wounds left behind by extraction: the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers and hollowed-out towns that now form the true map of our civilisation and our age. Everything we touch - rock, metal, sand, water, even thought itself - feeds the reckless dream pursuit of limitless economic growth. Born into a family and landscape steeped in fossil fuels, James Crawford travels through the living ruins of extraction and meets the people living within its extremes: exploring the radioactive fertiliser-ziggurats of Florida's Bone Valley, the lithium flats of the Atacama, Greenland's collapsing melt-edge, the desertified shores of Spain's Sea of Plastic, and the resource-hungry cloud centres birthing new artificial intelligences, to expose the true cost of this hollowed-out dream. Yet within these same landscapes lie radical alternatives. Hope emerges in the communities waging legal battles to leave oil untouched beneath the rainforests of Ecuador and the wildfire-stricken plains of Montana; technologists attempting to reverse extraction on Iceland's tundra; and architects raising wooden skyscrapers amid Scandinavia's felled forests - finding the path to repair for a world pushed to the brink. Incisive, immersive and visionary, The Vanishing Earth exposes the ideological forces that have shaped the planet and charts the essential pathways that could yet save it. 'Crawford belongs with other storyteller-explorers - strolling player-writers like Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Macfarlane - who are stretching naturalist observation into incisive cultural inquiry ... Riveting.' -New York Review of Books 'Historian and journalist Crawford takes readers on "a journey to the literal and ideological frontiers of extraction" in this sweeping account of the toll the pursuit of endless economic growth has taken on the planet ... a dizzying feat of reporting.' -Publisher's Weekly, starred review 'In The Vanishing Earth, James Crawford travels beyond the physical frontiers of a planet consuming itself into the human psyche, where the harvesting of thought, attention, emotions, and neural data represents represents the latest, and most intimate, form of extraction. The Vanishing Earth is urgent and immersive. Crawford asks not just what we are losing but why we can't stop.' -Greg Grandin, author of American, America