Apocalypse Past, Present and Future: James Crawford’s Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our long, hot summer of 2026. Seems to be a summer that, certainly in America, everyone has turned against technology according to The Wall Street Journal. It's a summer that America has become a nation of Luddites who are more and more suspicious of the impact of technology, the extractive quality of technology on society and on life in general. It may be because people have begun to read an important new book by my guest today, James Crawford, a Scottish-based writer living in Edinburgh. He has a new book out. The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. James, as I said, is joining us from Edinburgh. The book is already out in the US. It's coming out in the UK in a few days. James, congratulations if that's the right word on the new book. Has the zeitgeist shifted, James? You've been writing extensively on the impact of technology one way or the other on society. Has the penny finally dropped?

00:01:45 James Crawford: I think it has, actually. You know, and you'll understand with the lag time when you're writing a book. Some of the material I was writing about technology, about neurotechnology, in particular technology that can, to some extent, read our thoughts or interpret our thoughts was up to a couple of years ago. I was writing about data centers and the requirement of data centers for AI and the growth of data centers to maintain the really sort of snowball-like impact of AI on our everyday lives. And when I was writing about that, I don't think there was the level of everyday appreciation of those impacts. And I think even just in the last few months, particularly looking at America, the way the conversation has moved on data centers is remarkable because it's often very hard to find bipartisan issues in America, and data centers seems to be one of those. You know, regardless of what political stripe you are, there seems to be from the ordinary individual almost, you know, universal dislike of data centers and a very, very strong resistance to data centers appearing in your backyard.

00:03:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah. There was a piece, running around the media about a couple who owned, I think, some land in Kentucky who turned down a $25 million offer to buy their farm. And I think it's a most un-American story. Although in some ways, all this in your book is a very American story. I came across your book after you wrote something in Wired about big tech wanting to harvest your thoughts. It's a chilling prospect, and it's actually one I've given some thought to in the past. We're obsessed these days with AI. Tell me about this idea of big tech wanting to harvest our thoughts to essentially colonize our brains, James.

00:04:00 James Crawford: Yeah. I mean, the book is about a long journey, if you like, a journey to all sorts of different landscapes of extraction, physical, and in the case you're talking about metaphysical landscapes of the mind. And it's where I end up landing on towards the end of this journey of places we're taking things from is this idea of thought extraction. I think people will be very familiar with the attention economy, you know, how we browse the Internet, the way that is surveilled, that information is gathered, what we look at, whether it's on social media or whether it's just through our browsers, the way that has been monetized by all sorts of different tech companies over many, many years. So in that sense, that's the level below thought extraction. And what is both interesting and chilling is the way that neurotechnologies, as they're known, technologies that are moving from very cutting-edge laboratories, particularly in the US, but across the world. But there's, you know, there's some real pioneering work that's happening in America, are making their way out into the commercial marketplace. And there's all sorts of different commercial applications of these. Most are to do with sort of mood management, mood stabilization. But what they are doing is, a quite crude level right now, taking data from our brains, mostly by a technology called EEG, which is electroencephalography, which is monitoring and reading the electrical brainwaves as they're happening. And these technologies promise to make you feel more calm or more attentive. One of the things I thought was really interesting that I was looking at a company, which when I wrote this piece for Wired, I obviously had to go through the fact checking process. And as part of that fact checking process, there's a company called Emotiv that I was looking at, and their website has changed since I was writing the piece to when the pieces come out. So I was having to go back into the Wayback Machine to find an earlier iteration of the website from 2024, where they were talking particularly about how you could use that technology to gather neuro insights for marketing purposes. Now they've dropped that language, but that was the language that they were using previously. So you can see where this is heading. You know, we are all aware of how our behaviors have been harvested. Our online behaviors have been harvested and sold and monetized. But as that technological creep continues, we might find that our brainwaves are being monitored. And, you know, one of the things that I write about in the piece is a patent from some of the biggest tech companies like Meta and Snap and Apple, and particularly with Apple, the potential of developing EEG reading technology with the ubiquitous earbuds that so many people wear today. And in all of the instances that, an organization that I spoke to, the Neurorights Foundation, who were created by a very prominent neuroscientist, Rafael Yuste, along with a number of colleagues to look into the issues around what he describes as neurorights, is that of all the companies at the time I was writing, there was 30 sort of companies selling neurotech products on the market. All of them had unlimited access to our brain data as part of their commercial consumer contract. And there is no protection in place there at the moment.

00:07:57 Andrew Keen: James, you're a book guy. I know you have some book shows on, on the BBC, so you're all too familiar with the importance of titles. When I think of the title of your book, the Vanishing Earth, I think of a couple of things. Firstly, perhaps it's slightly euphemistic. Maybe it should be called Apocalypse Now, although that title, of course, has been taken.

00:08:21 James Crawford: It's gone.

00:08:23 Andrew Keen: And maybe we'll come back to that in the heart of darkness quality of your journeys. But I also wonder whether it should be called not just the vanishing earth, but the vanishing species, I e, us, because that's really what you're talking about, isn't it, in some way?

00:08:40 James Crawford: Well, it's us and, of course, so many other species. You know, we talk about the sixth extinction or, you know, the massive loss of biodiversity across the world. But, yeah, I think that sense of the journey that we have been on, the extractive journey that we have been on throughout human civilization and, you know, a big rationale for why I wrote the book I mean, it's really interesting. I was reading for research, not directly connected to the subject, but something else. I was reading the great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder. You know, what the first person to try and create a sort of compendium, if you like, of the natural world, who's writing— And he, in, in—

00:09:22 Andrew Keen: Pliny the Elder, in California, is noted because he had a very fine beer named after him. So if you ever get out to California, you'll have to drink not just the Pliny the Elder, but a Pliny the Younger.

00:09:35 James Crawford: I didn't realize that. He, he writes at one point, he's watching gold mining in the what is the Roman province of Spain and the process of, you know, burrowing into this mountain and to such an extent that there are only really supports keeping it up. And you remove the supports, and the mountain collapses. And in Latin, it's this is called ruina montium, the fall of mountains. And he's looking at that, and he's looking about the extent of the extractive industries, particularly sort of copper's extraction and smelting in the Roman Empire. And he has this quote where he says, when will be the end of thus exhausting the earth, and how far will avarice finally penetrate? And those are the two questions that, I guess, run like a sort of entwined seam through my book. And I think we're starting to get the answers now of when we will exhaust the earth and how far will greed go. You know, greed will go to a place of denial of the consequences of the extractive process itself, which we've also seen from the fossil fuel industry for many years now, for at least half a century. So this sense of we invented a process, ideologically came up with a process of economic growth, as a means of establishing a freedom in the world, a freedom from the caprices of nature, from famine, from starvation. That idea of economic growth is only really about 300 years old, and it made entire sense at the time that we came up with it. The problem is we have not really changed that ideological position, but the planet has changed. And the impact of pursuing that growth have put us in a completely different position. And that's where the vanishing aspect comes, not just the resources, but us and our opportunity to continue to exist on this planet.

00:11:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We may be being replaced. You noted Pliny the Elder, of course, living in a time well before the emergence of capitalism or a global kind of capitalism. James, is it coincidental that you're writing from Scotland where industrial capitalism in many ways was born three hundred years ago?

00:12:13 James Crawford: I don't think it is a coincidence. I mean, the other strand for the inspiration for writing this book is that I come from a family of engineers. You know, my father and his father and his father were all engineers. Before that, they were all fishermen, which was like a different form of extraction if you like, a bit more subsistence initially and has become more extractive. And my great grandfather immigrated to America because he didn't want to be a fisherman at 16. He came into Detroit through Canada. And when he was— he had to put his occupation on his immigration form, he put engineer even though that was not his occupation. He ended up working in the Ford Motor plant on the very first assembly line building the Model T. And that made— that started that shift in my family to this line of engineers. So my father's whole working life was concerned with extraction. He started off as an apprentice engineer in a coal mine. He then went to work the Zambian Copperbelt, and then for thirty years, he worked in the oil industry. And I was born on the Shetland Islands because he was there with his first job in oil, creating what was then one of the world's largest construction sites, an oil terminal to bring the newly discovered North Sea oil onshore. And he told me a story that the day that oil, that first oil as they call it, was coming onshore, you know, oil that no one had seen for a hundred and fifty million years of its kind of creation, because he was in charge of the pipelines, he knew a place to go. He took a lemonade bottle inside his jacket, found an outlet valve, twisted it, caught that lemonade— caught that oil in this lemonade bottle, and that oil now sits on the— still sits in the windowsill in my family home. So there's a whole story there of my own personal reckoning with my, you know, I am a product of extraction. I'm a product of the fossil fuel industry. But then we all are. You know, our modern civilization has been built on hydrocarbons. Every aspect of our modern life has been created through this form of extraction to the extent that we have, in some sense, as a species merged with extraction because there are microplastics in our bodies. You know, there are all sorts of forever chemicals that can pass, you know, down the fallopian tube, and down the you know, from the mother to the child, the unborn child in the womb. So, you know, this is a long journey that our species has been on. I'm not necessarily saying we're reaching the end of that journey, but we're reaching a point potentially of no return.

00:15:07 Andrew Keen: It's all a bit miserable. I mean, you— your books, your other books. You wrote about Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings. Are you a bit of a miserable fellow, James? Are you a pessimist? In— outside the issue of the extractive economy, do you tend to see the glass as always being half full?

00:15:31 James Crawford: I am Scottish after all, Andrew. So that's—

00:15:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So that was, I didn't put it that way. Otherwise, I get accused of being anti-Scottish.

00:15:40 James Crawford: I mean, I yes and no. Am I a glass half full person? To some extent, yes. At the same time, I don't think all is lost. And the reason I don't think all is lost is because the journey that we are on is an ideological one. So a mind can change. Thoughts can change. It's one of the reasons that I've— I zero in on thoughts as one of my landscapes of extraction because we have got to this position through one way of viewing the world, an ideological way of viewing the world, and that can change. The question is, will it change? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that, but I think there is hope in realizing that it can change.

00:16:27 Andrew Keen: Your Scottish intellectual forebears, Hume and particularly Smith, thought of us as, if not extractive creatures, certainly self-interested creatures. Is this the big problem, James, with The Vanishing Earth, that we're too self-interested? I mean, I wanna get into the journey in a few minutes. But is the philosophical— I mean, Marx, of course, pointed this out and many other people. Is the problem with capitalism our self-interest or the problem with the— with this version of the world our self-interest?

00:17:04 James Crawford: I'm not sure it is the problem necessarily with us and with capitalism. It's probably the problem with the system we have created or the system we have got to is if you commodify everything, this is where we end up. We don't have to commodify everything. There's different ways of placing value on things. There's different ways of valuing—

00:17:29 Andrew Keen: But we don't commodi— I mean, Marx, of course, argued that famously and Das Kapital. But, I mean, you're a book man. You've just written a book. I mean, your— this new book isn't a commodity. You interview lots of authors. You write. That's not commodification, is it?

00:17:46 James Crawford: It's not commodification, but do we value— how much do we value that in the system? You know, I suppose you could— is the value that you place on my book around how much it sells, how much covers it generates [as spoken] rather than what's contained within it? And I suppose you could look at the planet the same way. You know, is the value of a forest what it represents in terms of timber, or what it represents in terms of beauty. And, you know, it can become esoteric where you start to talk about the value of beauty, but it's— you know, one of the things I write about in the book was the initiative in— an unsuccessful initiative in—

00:18:21 Andrew Keen: [unclear — crosstalk]

00:18:21 James Crawford: Ecuador about its rainforest, the Ecuadorian rainforest, and trying to get the world to place a value on it, not to drill it for oil, to value its biodiversity, and to be paid not to despoil that. Now it didn't work. They were looking for something in the region of, I think, $3.5 billion, and they only managed to raise a few million towards that. But you can see the attempt to break out of that way of only be able to be part of the financial system and the cycle of growth if you move into commodification.

00:19:01 Andrew Keen: So tell me more about this journey. I hope you walked everywhere, James, did you?

00:19:07 James Crawford: I didn't walk everywhere. But as you can imagine, as a writer, I don't get out too much. So when I go on these sort of, you know, the— I travel to Chile, for instance, to explore lithium mining. I think I—

00:19:20 Andrew Keen: Atacama, which to me, I was there a few years ago, is one of the most remarkable places on Earth.

00:19:26 James Crawford: It is. It's one of the most remarkable and one of the most beautiful, and it's also one of the most fragile. And it has found itself in this interesting way right at the— you know, this pressure being placed on that landscape that it's seen as absolutely essential for the transition sort of electrification of the world because it is one of the world centers for lithium production, which is to do with the very specific geology of that landscape that there's vast amounts of lithium within this gigantic one of the largest salt flats on Earth. So it's a really special place, but it's a fragile place. And it's a really interesting landscape to explore in terms of the tensions for the people who live there, who are both for and against the lithium mining that's happening there. You know, you're in one of the driest places on Earth with one of the highest levels of solar evaporation on Earth. And at the same time, you're using quite substantial amounts of water in the lithium production at the same time as copper production surrounding landscapes as well. But the people— the indigenous people who have lived overlooking these salt flats for over ten thousand years, many of them are lithium miners. And as one of the indigenous villagers put it to me, lithium is the state to them. The government has never given them anything, but lithium has. Lithium has given them a photovoltaic plant rather than a diesel generator. Lithium has built a health center. Lithium has improved the roads surrounding, you know, the places they've lived in. And perhaps understandably in Chile, given its history and the long shadow of the Pinochet regime, they don't trust the government, but they do trust the lithium mining companies. And they've entered into profit-sharing deals with those lithium mining companies. So you get a sense of the tension that's being placed on there, but what's the endpoint of that? The demand is so high for lithium that there are bottlenecks approaching very soon, if not already. It's not going to be exhausted instantly, but we're going to run out of it in the short term, and the pressure is on these people and their landscape.

00:21:57 Andrew Keen: I mentioned Apocalypse Now as a joke. Maybe that should be the title of the book. Of course, that movie was borrowed from Joseph Conrad's great novella, Heart of Darkness, a journey up a river in Africa, which is, of course, metaphor for colonialism and extraction. Many books have been written on this, James. Again, you don't need me to tell you this about the extractive nature of contemporary Africa. We did a show a couple of years ago on the book Cobalt Red that, did very well. Did you travel to Africa in The Vanishing Earth?

00:22:39 James Crawford: I didn't travel to Africa partly because I'd— I wanted to select discrete landscapes to go to. I was aware of the book Cobalt Red and, to some extent, thought that had already been covered. I was wanting to focus in on things that we are running out of, or that are going to be being pushed to some degree of exhaustion. Lithium, obvious one. Lithium is such a, you know, a critical factor. I traveled to America to look at phosphate extraction. You know?

00:23:12 Andrew Keen: And this was in Bone Valley in Florida. Is that right?

00:23:17 James Crawford: Yeah. Central Florida. Something that I think very few people know about. You know, phosphate is absolutely essential for fertilizer production. The amount that we have used since the start of the twentieth century has absolutely skyrocketed, and I think a lot of people won't realize where it comes from. It comes from mining. I mean, actually, originally— and this is part of the process of breaking the cycle around the time of the development of capitalism and, you know, the real focus on economic growth, that phosphate used to be reintroduced into the fields through our own feces, animal feces. Our human feces was euphemistically known as night soil, which is a rather nice way.

00:24:00 Andrew Keen: So next time we go to the bathroom, we might suggest that we're going to lay our night soil.

00:24:06 James Crawford: Well, ex— exactly. And, you know, Victor Hugo in Les Miserables wrote about the sort of the gold mine of dung that was in cities that was not being used on fields. And then for a time, and this is rather gruesome, as the farms were starting to struggle around the sort of, beginning of the eighteenth century [ed.: nineteenth — the Hull bone trade peaked in the 1820s–40s] in England and in Scotland, they were looking for other sources of phosphates, not really quite understanding what they were doing at this stage, and started sourcing bones from all around Europe, which were ground up in bone mills. They were— most of these bones were brought into the city of Hull, unloaded on the quayside, taken away to these bone mills, and then spread across the fields. And they found that that was, you know, really, spectacularly effective in increasing soil fertility.

00:25:01 Andrew Keen: Maybe that's why people still don't like going to Hull. You mentioned— sorry. Go on.

00:25:08 James Crawford: Well, I think I can't speculate on Hull, but that journey—

00:25:13 Andrew Keen: We already cast aspersions on Scotland and Hull. We probably should be less— I should be less offensive. You mentioned data centers, earlier, and I'm talking to you from San Francisco on the edge of Silicon Valley where the optimists are promising the abundance of intelligence in our AI age. Your book focuses on scarcity, whether the scarcity of lithium in the Atacama Desert or phosphates in Central Florida. I wonder whether, James, in your sense, this obsession with abundance, there's even a best-selling book out in America entitled Abundance, this obsession with techno-optimists with abundance is the other side of the coin, this kind of the inevitable, product almost of scarcity, The Vanishing Earth? Do they— the two go together?

00:26:18 James Crawford: I think they do. I think they do because there's that sense particularly, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to travel to the places that I traveled to was to try and bring home, not in a— not a dispassionate way, but not writing a polemic either, where that abundance leads to. Because I think when you talk about abundance, you potentially are talking about abundance for a very small proportion of the Earth. And one of the things that I get towards the end of the book is looking at this concept of, what is a term that's been coined by a geographer called Kai Heron, which is eco-apartheid. And it's this idea that you will get these kind of enclaves of green transition places where everyone's got electric cars, where, you know, there's incredibly well-built, sustainable, energy-efficient structures, you know, everything that you would want for the kind of perfect utopian example of a world that is adapting, but these enclaves have been built by taking from the rest of the world. And to some extent, that is what has been happening. And, you know, if you're not seeing the damage and the impact in other places, then, of course, abundance seems entirely achievable. But what the Earth is telling us is that we already are using more of the Earth's biomass than is sustainable to have the level of growth in our economies that we have. And, of course, you need growth in an economy. Otherwise, it's seen as failing. So I think that idea of abundance is an illusion. And it's an illusion that you can sustain for a while, but then you reach the point where it becomes unsustainable. And I think increasingly you're reaching that point. And I think the data center example is a great— you know, it brings that home that to keep so many of the things that preoccupy us now, much of which lives in our phones and lives in our computers, there's both a huge material cost to that, but there's also a cost in terms of space and in terms of energy. And when that data center starts to appear in your backyard, as it is for many Americans right now, suddenly that idea of abundance becomes less utopian and a little more dystopian.

00:29:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I'm speaking to you from one of those enclaves, San Francisco, where the streets are crawling with Waymo, smart cars, driverless cars, and increasingly the skies with Wing, with autonomous robot air deliveries. So maybe, San Francisco is exhibit A in that argument. What about the geopolitics of this? I know you have a section in the book where you travel to what you call the melt-shore lands [as spoken] of Greenland. Donald Trump has, of course, cast his greedy eyes on Greenland from American point of view. Is that coincidental, or is that an inevitable feature of what you call The Vanishing Earth?

00:29:54 James Crawford: It's an inevitable feature. I mean, the reason I went to Greenland was to look into this concept, which seems bizarre, of sand mining in Greenland. And this is because there's a global sand shortage. And the reason there's a global sand shortage is because of the scale of construction, on the planet at the moment. I mean, you know, one of the killer— I mean, you read all sorts of research papers, you know, all the things that you do when you're writing a book, the, you know, just the avalanche of material that you have to comb through. And there was— there's one paper in particular that just stopped me in my tracks, which— it had this— it looked at the amount of material that we had constructed on Earth. And it had discovered that sometime around 2020, a threshold was crossed where the weight of everything humans had built had come to exceed the weight of the Earth's biomass. So everything we had constructed, buildings, built environments, plastics, all of this had come to weigh more than all of the plants and animals on Earth. And then you think, wow. That in itself is remarkable. Then the next detail is how quickly that happened. So at the start of the twentieth century, the weight of all things that humanity had created was 3% of the Earth's biomass. And it's only in the latter part of the twentieth century you have this vast acceleration so that it comes to exceed the weight of the Earth's biomass. So it's really the past fifty to seventy years that this has happened. You know, one of the key things I talk about is we've extracted more in the past fifty years than in all of the rest of human history combined.

00:31:45 Andrew Keen: And we have a word for that, don't we? Isn't it? Anthropocene?

00:31:50 James Crawford: Yeah. Well, that's— yes. This is this idea that we've entered this new geological period where it's not the Earth that's determining geology. It's humans. And certainly, in the case of sand, we have the sand that we use in construction has to be riverine sand. You can't use the sand of the desert. So this idea of a sand shortage, it's specific sand that we don't have, and it's the sand that's generated by river erosion, those processes which can take hundreds of thousands of years, but which deposit sand along riverbeds, in estuaries, on beaches, all of this. That's the sand that we use for construction because desert sand is too smooth. It's wind eroded, so it'd be a little bit— you use sand in creating concrete and cement. If you use desert sand, it's a little bit like building with marbles, to put it crudely. So you need these kind of slightly more abrasive riverine sands. And those are things that we are running out of globally because we're using them so much. You know, there's another statistic that we are building a city the size of Paris every five days on Earth. And if you think we used a lot of cement over the latter part of the twentieth century, since the start of the twenty-first century, in ten years, China used more cement than America had in all of the twentieth century. So you get an idea of where the sand shortage is coming from. And then you turn to somewhere like Greenland. And because the ice sheet in Greenland and the glaciers in Greenland are melting, and they're melting far faster than ever before, and their melt rate is increasing, they are releasing a lot of water into the Earth's ocean, but also vast amounts of sediment because the glaciers have eroded the landscape that they have moved through, and they've picked up all this sediment. So while the general trend across the world is rising sea levels, in Greenland, it's a growing coastline from sediment. And there was this idea a few years ago of mining Greenland sand to be able to export it around the world to places where you're running out of it. Like California, for instance, which doesn't do its own sand mining and takes its sand from Vancouver Island at the moment. It's vast amounts of sand requirements. Could it take it from Greenland in the future? And, of course, it's not just sand in Greenland. That's one potential area of extraction. It's also critical minerals, copper, gold, rubies, oil, all of these things. You have a pristine landscape, and this is what extraction does. You use up one place, you move on to the next place. You get in, you get out. And I think Greenland's— this— it's on the cusp, and it's the only country really in the world that has this where its indigenous people have control over its natural resources. And the question is what will they do? Because there is this generation of young Greenlanders, you know, all on their iPhones, all with their laptops. You know, I saw them in these chic cafes in the capital city. The capital city is undergoing vast construction boom. There's about 19,000 people live there. In the next ten years, they want it to be 30,000 or more. So there's cranes and construction works all over the city. So that's the question. Is extraction coming to Greenland? Do they want it to? And their take on it, or if you talk to a lot of Greenlanders, is we didn't cause global warming, so why shouldn't we benefit from it? Why can't we make money from it? And there is an imperative for them to make money because currently they're subsidized by the Danish government, and they want financial independence.

00:35:28 Andrew Keen: You mentioned China, James, who could also make the same argument, I think, about the West's dominance and why shouldn't they enjoy the fruits, the harvest of all this, as you would put it. We had Bill McKibben on the show last year who's much more optimistic than you. I mean, he's more of a formal environmentalist, and he believes in solar power, which, of course, China is pioneering. What's your take on I'm sure you're familiar with what McKibben's saying on solar and this Chinese role in renewable energy and their attempt, maybe a top-down attempt, to address some of the issues that you're concerned about in The Vanishing Earth?

00:36:24 James Crawford: I mean, I don't want to be portrayed as entirely doom and gloom about it, but, obviously, I think there are significant concerns with the direction of travel. And I think one of the things with the energy transition is to what extent it genuinely is a transition. Because this is one of the other things, statistics that sort of floors you is that I think it was 2025. We burnt more wood, more coal, and more oil than ever before in human history in a single year. And the concept of transition is that we used to burn wood, then we moved on to coal. We used to burn coal, then we moved on to oil. We used to burn oil, now we'll move on to solar. That doesn't seem to be the trajectory. It's just more energy to drive more things. And, of course, data centers are one of those things, but it's all sorts of things. It's, you know, it's the way we use the world, and it's very hard for humans to scale back on luxury once they have it. You know? You know, it's that idea of maybe you shouldn't have the lights on so much. You know, maybe you shouldn't look at your phone so much. You know, all of that. We struggle with that. Once you have access to that abundance, it's in our nature to both enjoy it and to want more of it. And I think that's the difficulty in that it's not just a question of where does the energy come from. It's also a question of how we use it and what we use it for. You know, one of the things that I was planning to look at in detail in the book was nuclear fusion, you know, and telling the story of this kind of journey to clean energy nuclear fusion, which, you know, you can power with a small amount of lithium and seawater, creates very, very little waste. But, actually, if we had that universal clean energy, what would we do with it? Have we learned how to use it appropriately? I'm not sure that we have. And I think that's the question.

00:38:29 Andrew Keen: Absolutely.

00:38:29 James Crawford: I think that, you know, as the author Ian McEwan, who I saw speak recently, makes you believe in the prospect of a benign God [as spoken] because of the way that the sun's rays can react with photovoltaic cells and give you energy. Something beautiful in that and something miraculous in that. But there is a but. How do we use it? How does that actually become a genuine energy transition, not just more? And that's the question. How do we move away from more? And it goes back to this. You may well be familiar with Jevons paradox.

00:39:08 Andrew Keen: Explain what it is.

00:39:10 James Crawford: So, this is a scientist in the nineteenth century looking at Britain's coal. This is William Stanley Jevons. And he was concerned about Britain running out of coal and what would happen. And he was looking at the country and saying, you know, coal has propelled Britain to this incredible position. It's propelled the empire. But what happens when we run out? And how do we more efficiently use coal? And what happens if steam engines are more efficient? You know, that you for the same amount of coal, you generate more energy. And so he studied this, and what he found is that if you improve the efficiency of steam engines, rather than using less coal to get the same energy, you just use more coal to get more energy. And this does seem to be the way that we are handling energy at the moment. And that's the concern with the energy transition that it isn't a genuine transition. It's just an accumulation. And that's where the sustainability issue comes in. That is not sustainable on this planet.

00:40:15 Andrew Keen: You're a book guy, as I said. I mean and this book, this new book, The Vanishing Earth, is very much in the tradition of Silent Spring, 1962, a book by Rachel Carson, which, of course, created the field. I wonder what the literary challenges, James, of this kind of journey. I recently rewatched a remarkable movie, 1982 movie. I'm sure you've seen it. Koyaanisqatsi, which in some ways is a kind of, the film version of what you're trying to do. Are there challenges or opportunities to write about this as opposed to make a documentary? You also do documentaries. You work with the BBC. I assume you've thought about turning this book into a documentary, making what you saw in Greenland or Florida or the Atacama Desert or Southern Spain more visual?

00:41:21 James Crawford: Absolutely. I mean, that, Koyaanisqatsi, that film with the Philip Glass music, that incredible performance.

00:41:29 Andrew Keen: Incredible film, isn't it?

00:41:30 James Crawford: It's an incredible film. I would— I think you can watch it on YouTube, actually. I'd recommend anybody to have a look at it and to certainly, because I remember writing about it years ago for a different book, for Fallen Glory that you showed [as spoken]. I briefly wrote about, that film. Yes. I do think there's opportunity in that. And I think, in a way, one of the things about documentaries, television, books, you know, you mentioned Silent Spring, the potential, and I have no sense at all about my own book whether it has that potential, but the potential to effect genuine change. You know, Silent Spring did. Silent Spring did, and it shocked people to such an extent that it led to the complete restriction of the use of DDT. It's following on from that, you had the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in America, which didn't exist prior to that. So you do have material change from these things. You know, a number of years ago, there was a David Attenborough documentary that looked at oceanic plastic and which everyone had known about for years and years, particularly anybody in the environmental community knew about. But suddenly, it was getting talked about in the British Parliament the next day. You know? So that kind of exposure, that kind of popular exposure can genuinely lead to change. And I think that, you know, if you're thinking about the literary potential of these kind of things, if you can write it in such a way that you can really reach people and make them think differently, think differently about not just the individuals who are involved in this, but the very nature of the extractive world that we built, then maybe you can effect change. I mean, it's difficult as a writer to know whether you'd achieve that or not. You can only do what you can try and do in—

00:43:31 Andrew Keen: Right. I mean, very, very briefly, James, to end. I mean, it's an important read. I think it's gonna have quite an impact. I'm sure it will be shortlisted for all sorts of best of lists. But what do you want people to get very briefly from this book? They're gonna read it. They're gonna be troubled by everything you've seen and all your observations. What's the next step having— I mean, we want people to pick this book up and read it, these dispatches from the frontiers of extraction. What would you like people to take away very briefly as a final—

00:44:08 James Crawford: I aim, by looking at the concept of repair and what that means. And, you know, my final chapter is called forever repair. And it's that idea that there's no way of going back to the worlds before, but there's a way of living differently in this world. And I, you know, I look at the example, and I'll explain this very briefly of Butte, Montana, which was the center of world copper production. It had a mine right in the heart of the city of Butte so that when it became an open-cast mine, the city surrounds this gigantic hole in the ground, which filled up with water. And because of the nature of the mine works, that water was essentially sulfuric acid. For thirty-odd years, there was discussion over what to do about this site. And finally, a settlement was reached around 2020 that the oil company who happens to own it, which is BP, has a blank check to monitor the soils and water of that city in perpetuity. And that introduces the concept of the forever repair because the people of Butte, rather than abandon their city, they are going to stay and monitor its soils, monitor its water, but also commit to telling a story of the repair that that city needs forever. So this concept of you have to repair forever, it's not you fix and you forget. Everything is a repair. You can take the story of that place and apply it to the world in how we think about the world. And that's the shift in ideology away from the capitalist extractive ideology to an ideology of repair. And I think that's where I want people to get to, to understand that nature of that journey.

00:45:50 Andrew Keen: From repair or from extraction to repair, the message, an important new book, The Vanishing Earth, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. James Crawford, thank you so much, and best of luck with the book.

00:46:05 James Crawford: Thanks very much, Andrew.