In 2020, while many of us were suspended in the weird interregnum of Covid lockdown, the world quietly passed a dizzying threshold, as the mass of the things humans have made – our roads and buildings and machines and throwaway plastics – overtook the collective mass of every living thing on the planet.
As James Crawford points out in his expansive and gripping study of extraction, The Vanishing Earth: A journey through the last days of abundance, it would be easy to assume this milestone was reached only through the steady accumulation of stuff over many thousands of years. But that is not the case. Instead we have raced towards it over the course of just a few decades. In 1900, the stuff we had made was a mere 3 per cent of the Earth’s biomass. The other 97 per cent plus was created in the past century and a bit, and the vast bulk of it in the past 40 years. At the rate we’re going, the things humans have made will weigh three times global biomass within 15 years.
This astonishing increase in material wealth and waste has not been magicked out of nowhere. The closed nature of the Earth’s systems means every gram of it had to be extracted from somewhere: dug up or cut down or grown on land alienated from the natural environment. And just as the amount of stuff we make has risen exponentially, so has its impact on the natural world. Last month, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found seven of nine planetary boundaries had already been breached. The planet, it says, is in a critical condition.
None of this is news. Most of us understand the planet is in deep trouble. Yet we seem incapable of translating that understanding into change. So instead of altering our path, we continue to accelerate into catastrophe. The incomprehensibility of this act of existential self-harm and the uncomfortable awareness we are all “living on borrowed time” shadows The Vanishing Earth. Yet, as it beats out a steady drumbeat in the background, Crawford descends into the questions of how we got here, and how we might avoid the ruination of the planet before it is too late.
These are big questions, and Crawford – a historian, and author of books such as 2022’s acclaimed study of borders and borderlands, The Edge of the Plain – allows himself a suitably large canvas to explore them. Beginning with the often-derided work of the Club of Rome and its finding that unrestricted growth can only result in global overshoot and collapse, he circles out through time and space, exploring the past and future of extraction.
Crawford’s panoptic view of capitalism’s insatiable hunger for resources is often exhilarating in its sweep and detail, but The Vanishing Earth’s real heft is grounded in the strength of his reporting. The interaction between the two is brilliantly apparent in the chapter on phosphate. This begins with the ships loaded with human and animal bones that were ploughed into the fields of Britain and elsewhere to increase their productivity in the early years of industrialisation. This early excursion into artificial fertilisation effectively decoupled agricultural production from natural limits, but it soon led not just to the plundering of graveyards across Europe but the excavation of prehistoric deposits of fossilised plankton rich in phosphate. By the 20th century this extractive hunger was focused on Florida, where large areas have been reduced to a moonscape of mined-out ponds and towering hills of tailings known as gypstacks. As sea levels rise, these gypstacks may well be the only parts of Florida to survive – “a phosphogypsum archipelago”.
Other chapters are equally impressive. In Greenland he finds an unsettling inversion of the situation in Florida, as retreating glaciers expose vast reserves of sand – the second most extracted substance on Earth and necessary for everything from concrete to computers. Similarly, his chapter on lithium mining in the Atacama Desert captures not just the stark beauty of that most extreme of environments but also the uncanny strangeness of the unearthly green pools of brine that are used to extract the lithium. This is anchored by a historical perspective that makes it clear that lithium is only the newest in a long series of extractive frontiers that continue to shape both the landscape of the Atacama and the history of Chile and its neighbours.
What becomes apparent over and over again is the relentlessness of the drive for extraction, and the way, like a swarm of locusts, it consumes everything its path and then moves on to the next frontier. Crawford’s narrative also brings the obdurate resistance to reality of this approach into focus, eloquently capturing the refusal to recognise limits of any kind.
The question of how we might do that occupies the book’s final sections, when Crawford pivots from accounts of destruction to a guarded account of the possibility of doing things differently, a “metamorphosis of sacrifice into stewardship”. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the force of the chapters that came before, these sections feel more guarded and tentative. He explores Ecuador’s attempts to enact laws to give rights to nature and schemes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While he sees technology as part of the solution, he is rightly wary of the narratives that present technology as a panacea, or which assume the transition to a greener form of capitalism will save us. Instead he turns to Ursula Le Guin’s famous thought experiment, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, in which happiness for all is bought through the immiseration of a single child, to argue it is necessary to live in the difficult space of accepting the system cannot be saved. Our only option is to accept that we must live within limits and embark on a program of planetary repair. After all, “the alternative … is the planetary mine”, a world where even if we do manage to hold out for a while in smaller and smaller enclaves, that cannot go on forever. Because “eventually you run out of boundaries to cross. You run out of places, and people to sacrifice.”
Scribe, 448pp, $39.99