The Vanishing Earth:
A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance
Overview
A deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction.
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. Across every continent lie the immense wounds left behind by extraction: the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers and hollowed-out towns that now form the true map of our civilisation and our age.
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.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Hardback
- 234mm x 153mm
- 448 pages
- 9781917189590
- GBP£25.00
- 10 September 2026
- UK & Commonwealth (ex. Can)
- Rogers, Coleridge & White
Praise
Praise for The Edge of the Plain:
‘Searching, generous, and stirringly written … [Crawford inscribes] a palimpsest of associations across time with his impressive command of different disciplines (history, geology, cybernetics, ecology, biology), moving skillfully from surveying the scene of a border to the meanings it holds for those on either side of it. 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.’
Praise for The Edge of the Plain:
‘A lyrical tour of borders in the past and the present … 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.’
About the Author
James Crawford is an acclaimed historian, writer, and broadcaster. Born in the Shetlands, he studied History and Philosophy of Law at the University of Edinburgh and worked for a decade for Scotland’s National Collection of Architecture and Archaeology. He is the author of ten books including, Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings and The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, both of which were shortlisted for Non-Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland’s National Book Awards. He is also the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship books programme, ‘Take Four Books’.