Vanishing Earth, the [non-booktrade only]

Author: James Crawford
In the last fifty years we have taken more out of the planet than in all prior history combined. Across every continent lie the wounds left behind by extraction: the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers and hollowed-out towns that now form the map of our civilisation. Incisive and visionary, this book exposes the ideological forces that have shaped the planet and charts the essential pathways that could yet save it.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: 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.
ISBN 9781761382116. Scribe Publications. pb. 448 pages. 23.4 x 15.3 cm.
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