The Vanishing Earth
Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
"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
"Crawford is at his best when surrendering to his propensity for reverie, an irrepressible, almost romantic sense of wonder that drives the reader from chapter to chapter." --WASHINGTON POST
From the acclaimed author of The Edge of the Plain, a journey to the ravaged frontiers of extractive industry 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 from the Earth than in all prior history combined. The planet is littered with the vast scars of extraction – yet, ironically, it is only by confronting the ruins of our 'old' world that we can find the path towards 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 towards 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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian and journalist Crawford (The Edge of the Plain) 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. Braiding history and travelogue, the book is "a pilgrimage," Crawford writes, "among the living ruins of extractive capitalism," chronicling what it looks, smells, and feels like as humanity's industrial engine has "accelerated... all of the planet's biogeochemical cycles... taking them far beyond their capacity to regenerate or replenish." In the present, he visits the likes of the groundwater-guzzling lithium harvesters on the salt flats of Chile's Atacama Desert. Turning to the past, he tours such gruesome sites as the "industrial bone mills" of 19th-century Britain, where human and animal remains dredged out of the battlefields of Europe were ground into fertilizer. Along the way, he studies the ideological underpinnings of extraction, particularly the notion of "escape" from the material limits of the natural world. Crawford also offers a "fragile" glimpse of a "viable future," highlighting less environmentally damaging feats of science and engineering, such as wooden skyscrapers. But as he brings the ruinous consequences of extraction into sharp relief, it becomes clear that, as one climate scientist explains, "the decline of our... civilization is inevitable. It will disappear and become something different." It's a dizzying feat of reporting.
