A journey to the ravaged frontiers of extraction and the promising, often radical alternatives emerging just as we reach the point of exhausting the earth’s natural resources.
 
Over the last half century, humanity has taken more resources from the earth than in all prior history combined. The planet is littered with the vast scars of extraction. It is only by confronting the ruins of our “old” world that we can find the path toward the “new.”

In The Vanishing Earth, James Crawford, born into a landscape and family steeped in fossil fuels, takes readers to the literal and ideological frontiers of extraction. Beginning with the story of humanity’s decoupling from nature, Crawford embarks on an epic journey to five resource landscapes rapidly trending toward exhaustion: landscapes of rock, metal, sand, water, and thought. From the salt flats of Chile’s Atacama Desert lithium mines to the “sacrifice zone” of Florida’s phosphorus-rich Bone Valley, and even to chillingly advanced attempts to harvest personal data from the brain itself, Crawford explores some of the most extreme scenes of the Anthropocene. Along the way, he asks what lies behind our insatiable appetites and explores emerging alternatives that might just spare our vanishing natural resources, transform our economies, and save our relationship with nature itself.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
James Crawford is an acclaimed historian, publisher and broadcaster. His book Fallen Glory was selected as a Sunday Times Must Read, and a Book of the Year by the New Statesman and the Independent. His latest, The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World earned rave reviews in The New York Review of Books and The Washington Post, and was featured on CNN’s Amanpour. He lives in Edinburgh.