The Vanishing Earth: A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance

Join us on Monday 19th October at 7pm for a conversation with James Crawford and his book The Vanishing Earth: A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance.

A 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 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.

James Crawford is an acclaimed historian, broadcaster, and author of ten books including The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World. He is also the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship books programme, ‘Take Four Books’, one of our favourite book podcasts.

James will be in conversation with us, before answering questions from the audience and signing copies of the book. The event is at Century Hall, The Link Centre, Ashbourne at 7pm.

Image credit: © Brodie Crawford