The Vanishing Earth
Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction
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The Vanishing Earth
Narrated by:
James Crawford
Pre-order Now for £4.95
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Narrated by:
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James Crawford
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By:
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James Crawford
"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.
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Critic reviews
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.
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)
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.
Urgent, illuminating, and deeply unsettling, The Vanishing Earth forces us to confront a stark question: if the logic of extraction is driving us toward planetary collapse, what kind of society must we build to escape it? (Kohei Saito, internationally bestselling author of SLOW DOWN)
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