The Vanishing Earth

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. He explores 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.

Beautifully written, surprising, and (dare I say it) important, The Vanishing Earth explores the ragged edges and obscure interiors of capitalism's relentlessly expanding territory and asks how we can stop commodifying and consuming everything from sand to our own minds before it really is too late. This book is worth your time and attention.
- Adam Welz, author of The End of Eden

The Vanishing Earth is an astounding achievement, and the best account I've yet read of the modern pathology of extraction. It's accessible and rigorous, ranging across continents and decades, and alternately chilling, terrifying, and infuriating, particularly in its lucid demonstration of the foreknowledge of the oil and gas giants and the historic and ongoing denialism of the economic and political mainstream. Crawford expertly guides us across an impressive range of material and actors, in prose that's both elegant and gripping. It's a vital, bracing synthesis, rousing and clear-sighted, and one that's ultimately not without hope, in its belief that the world can be repaired and remade.
- Martin MacInnes, Booker-nominated author of In Ascension

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 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