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 BooksA 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 a