GoKawiilTwo 2026 books warn of unsustainable scale of global resource extraction
Two forthcoming books—James Crawford's 'The Vanishing Earth' and Kerstin Hoppenhaus's 'The Elements of Life'—examine humanity's accelerating use of Earth's raw materials. Crawford visits five landscapes reshaped by mining and drilling, including Chile's Atacama salt flats, while Hoppenhaus focuses on nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the elements essential to plant growth. Both works document how extraction has outpaced all prior human history in just the last fifty years.