The Vanishing Earth

‘You will never look at sand, food, phones, or concrete the same way after reading this book. A touching exploration of the dark underbelly of our modern world and how we can move beyond it.’ Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse

‘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

A deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction — and a search for the path to repair.

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. Everything we touch ― rock, metal, sand, water, even thought itself ― feeds the pursuit of limitless economic growth.

Born into a family and a Scottish 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.