🚨COVER REVEAL! 🚨 Several years in the writing, my new book, THE VANISHING EARTH is an odyssey to the frontiers of extraction & to the radical alternatives emerging just as we threaten to exhaust the earth's natural resources... OUT AUG/SEP from @scribepub & @BloomsburyPub

This week I talk with James Crawford on The Vanishing Earth, extraction, climate crisis and the necessity of repair. Plus, my 2009 interview with Max Page on why Americans have imagined New York’s destruction for generations. tinyurl.com/WVvanishing

James Crawford’s requiem for a ravaged planet Mining and industry have laid waste to landscapes across the world. According to The Vanishing Earth, radical change is needed if we are to fix them ✍️ @jeevanvasagar bit.ly/4hovC05

Apocalypse Past, Present and Future, by @ajkeen keenon.substack.com/p/apocal… @Jdcrawf “When will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate?” the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder asked in 77 AD. Two thousand years later, the answer seems clear. At least according to the contemporary Scottish natural historian James Crawford. In his new book, The Vanishing Earth, the Edinburgh-based Crawford provides dispatches from what he calls the “frontiers of extraction.” From the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to the melting coastline of Greenland, Crawford describes the apocalyptic consequences of our avarice toward the earth. The ultimate frontier of extraction, Crawford warns, is ourselves. Thus he reports on big tech’s designs to harvest our thoughts. Consumer headsets are already reading our brainwaves, Apple holds patents for brain-reading earbuds, and another self-styled “leader in real-world neuroscience” once promised “neuro insights for marketing purposes.” The Vanishing Earth’s apocalyptic warnings appear both timeless and immediate. Watching Roman miners destroy Spanish mountains, Pliny the Elder wondered when we would finally exhaust the earth. Today, we can quantify the answer. Sometime around 2020, the weight of everything humanity has built came to exceed the weight of all life on Earth. It was just three percent in 1900. We have extracted more in the past fifty years than in all prior human history combined. We now build a city the size of Paris every five days. The ideology of endless growth is only 300 years old, Crawford warns. Pliny the Elder’s earth is history. Crawford confesses that he is a product of extraction himself. On his family’s windowsill sits a lemonade bottle of the first North Sea crude, siphoned by his father the day it came ashore. “I am Scottish, after all,” he notes wryly. Will our avarice transform extraction into extinction? Not necessarily, Crawford explains. His last dispatch is from Butte, Montana, and offers a ray of hope. There he finds people trying to repair the seemingly apocalyptic consequences of copper mining on the earth. So apocalypse now doesn’t mean apocalypse tomorrow. We still have the power to unvanish the earth, the agency to undo the avarice of our ancestors.

The superb @GMacraeBurnet, twice a Booker nominee, talking to @Jdcrawf at the @edbookfest about his novella Benbecula, one of the @PolygonBooks Darkland Tales. He revealed that in his student days, he read Samuel Beckett standing up, in the belief that this would attract girls.

“Climate appears to have a unique ability to stoke this reactionary politics: its planetary scale is a difficult fit for movements of ‘the people’ organised by nation or culture; and a world that’s both politically and climatically unstable is an easy object of conspiracism.”

Extract from my new book THE VANISHING EARTH in @WIRED - as well as journeying to physical landscapes of extraction I also consider what may be extraction’s final frontier - our individual thoughts, the coal face our consciousness… @BloomsburyPub

This week on #TakeFourBooks on @BBCRadio4 I was talking to Maggie O’Farrell @author_magfarr about new novel LAND, what it means to map a country, & her 3 influences, including Jospeh O’Connor and Marie Heaney - listen now! 🎧📚📻👇 bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xzp…

“A dizzying feat of reporting” - delighted with this pre-pub starred review from @PublishersWkly for my forthcoming book THE VANISHING EARTH from @BloomsburyPub and @scribepub!

Loved talking to @katiekitamura on @BBCRadio4 about her latest @TheBookerPrizes shortlisted & @PulitzerPrizes finalist novel AUDITION and 3 brilliant influences inc Rosemary's Baby, Javier Marias, Maupassant (& bonus influence David Lynch!) Listen now! 👇 bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002wjj…

On today's #TakeFourBooks on @BBCRadio4 I talked with @GhoshAmitav about new novel GHOST EYE & his 3 influences: two ghost stories (one about a haunted palace, another about a haunted river) and Robert Macfarlane's "Is A River Alive?" Listen now! 📚🎧👇bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002w7…

Danish poet Inger Christensen's book-length poem #alphabet was discussed on @BBCRadio4's Take Four Books with writer Solvej Balle. A clip of Susanna Nied reading from her translation (taken from @AilbheDarcy's 2020 Radio 4 feature Alphabet) was played. bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002v9l…

It may not be the 18th of November but it is 'Selter Day' on @BBCRadio4 #TakeFourBooks as I talk to SOLVEJ BALLE about her @FaberBooks serial novel ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME & her 3 influences (inc brill poem Alphabet!) - come join us in the time loop! bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002v9l…

Listen now to my chat with Yann Martel on @BBCRadio4 about new novel SON OF NOBODY & his 3 influences: Homer's Iliad (as translated by Stephen Mitchell), Alice Oswald's poem Memorial & Edward Albee's classic 1960s play. From the Trojan War to marital war! bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002td…

Listen now to my @BBCRadio4 chat with John Lanchester about new @FaberBooks novel 'Look What You Made Me Do' and his three comic novel influences, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym & Kurt Vonnegut! 🎧📚👇 bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002rq…

PRE-ORDER NOW FOR 25% off (My new book THE VANISHING EARTH coming out September ‘26!) waterstones.com/book/the-van…

Listen now to my @BBCRadio4 chat with Ali Smith about new novel GLYPH & 3 influences, including a novel about a magic donkey hide (by Balzac!), a book of nonsense & Leo Tolstoy! bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qg…

Today, 4pm on #TakeFourBooks on @BBCRadio4 I'm talking to @RobDoyle1 about his "mise en abyme" new novel CAMEO, and 3 influences - absolute crackers this week in the form of Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolano and Marguerite Yourcenar! Listen here 📚🎧👇bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002q28…