“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.

Five Takeaways

• Pliny’s Two Questions. Watching Romans collapse mountains, Pliny asked when we’d finish exhausting the earth and how far avarice would penetrate. The 300-year-old growth ideology no longer fits the planet.

• A Lemonade Bottle of First Oil. Great-grandfather on Ford’s first assembly line; father from coal to thirty years of oil; a bottle of the first North Sea crude on the family windowsill. “I am a product of extraction. But then we all are.”

• Thought Extraction. Thirty neurotech companies, every one claiming unlimited brain-data rights. Apple patents brain-reading earbuds. The attention economy was the opening bid.

• Heavier Than Life Itself. Around 2020, everything we’ve built came to outweigh all life on Earth. A Paris every five days; more extracted in fifty years than all history; 2025 burned more wood, coal, and oil than ever. Not a transition — an accumulation.

• The Forever Repair. In Butte, Montana, a copper pit became an acid lake — and the people stayed to monitor it forever. “Everything is a repair.” From extraction to repair: the ideology can change.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy The Vanishing Earth: jamescrawford.space

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: a Luddite summer finds its atlas
00:04:00 Thought extraction: when big tech harvests the brain
00:07:57 Should it be called Apocalypse Now? (Title’s taken)
00:08:40 Pliny the Elder’s two questions (and his beer)
00:12:13 A lemonade bottle of first oil: three generations of extraction
00:15:07 Are you a miserable fellow? (“I am Scottish, after all”)
00:19:01 The Atacama: “lithium is the state”
00:23:12 Bone Valley: night soil, Hull, and the phosphate addiction
00:29:54 Greenland: sand, sovereignty, and Trump’s greedy eyes
00:31:45 Heavier than life: the 2020 threshold
00:35:28 McKibben, China, and the solar question
00:36:24 2025: more wood, coal, and oil than ever
00:38:29 A benign God and the Jevons paradox
00:40:15 Silent Spring, Koyaanisqatsi, and the power of exposure
00:44:08 Butte, Montana, and the forever repair