James Crawford’s latest book THE VANISHING EARTH is out now in the UK and the US, from Scribe and Bloomsbury.
“[A] Requiem for a ravaged planet… Despite its gritty subject matter, The Vanishing Earth is poetically written and it ends in hope” The Observer
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.