James Crawford

THE VANISHING EARTH @bloomsburypub @scribeukbooks | WILD HISTORY @BirlinnBooks | Presenter @BBCRadio4 TAKE FOUR BOOKS | Editor @PolygonBooks | CHAIR @edbookfest

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

🚨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

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

THE VANISHING EARTH included in this @FT round up of best new environment books!

[FT Weekend @ftweekend]

Honking hippos and windy walruses — the best new environment books https://t.co/8w2r5btb1O

[Joanne: Portobello Book Blog 📚 💕 @portybelle]

First Line Friday 6th November 2026 - Wild History: Journeys Into Lost Scotland by James Crawford @Jdcrawf @BirlinnBooks | #FirstLineFriday #BookSky #ReadingScotland26 https://t.co/3Aj5gYIWex

[The Saturday Paper @SatPaper]

In 'The Vanishing Earth', James Crawford’s narrative brings Western civilisation's drive for extraction 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. https://t.co/MHbceCeiOV

[The Saturday Paper @SatPaper]

The uncomfortable awareness we are all “living on borrowed time” shadows The Vanishing Earth. Yet, as James Crawford descends into the questions of how we got here, he also explores how we might avoid the ruination of the planet before it is too late. https://t.co/z0RRKQ64ky

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

I talked to @bbcworldservice The Climate Question about my new book THE VANISHING EARTH 👇🎧📚

[BBC World Service @bbcworldservice]

Lithium and copper are crucial to the energy transition, but at what environmental cost?

🎧 Why we find it so hard to save our own planet, and how we might change that https://t.co/tTBvPud8YX

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

@markcousinsfilm I need this! 😂

[Writer's Voice @WritersVoice]

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. https://t.co/IGncVm3Thk

[The Observer @ObserverUK]

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
https://t.co/sZyTkgizAJ

[Andrew Keen @ajkeen]

Apocalypse Past, Present and Future, by @ajkeen https://t.co/Yc3TWJJyE8
@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.

[Olga Wojtas @OlgaWojtas]

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.

[David Wallace-Wells @dwallacewells]

“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.”

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

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

[WIRED @WIRED]

Silicon Valley companies are already working on neurotechnology products that track your brain activity. The next privacy frontier might be the things you only think. https://t.co/YKXe2zXaIS

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

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! 🎧📚📻👇

https://t.co/FeiMdT2Ym6

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

“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!

[Publishers Weekly @PublishersWkly]

Historian and journalist Crawford takes readers on ‘a journey to the literal and ideological frontiers of extraction’ in this sweeping account of the toll the pursuit of endless economic growth has taken on the planet. https://t.co/S3fKGUcp81

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

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! 👇 https://t.co/RI0UwI6X4O

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

@BasuAshis @GhoshAmitav @BBCRadio4 You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify as well!

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

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! 📚🎧👇https://t.co/rcINPGhLjt

[Bloodaxe Books @BloodaxeBooks]

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.
https://t.co/C8CHbVS306

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

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! https://t.co/toehhqvGcM

[James Crawford @Jdcrawf]

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! https://t.co/pVrq3g8eCg