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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
Extraction Built Our World. Now Comes the Reckoning.
What do we do when the systems that created modern prosperity begin to undermine the conditions for life itself?
I talk with James Crawford about The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. Crawford grew up in a family shaped by coal, copper and North Sea oil. Now he’s asking what that history means in a world where extraction reaches into virtually everything we do.
We talk about lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the limits of a purely technological green transition, the rights of nature, climate litigation and the poisoned landscape of Butte, Montana, where environmental repair will have to continue indefinitely.
“The repair isn’t about returning us to what we were, it’s about facing what we are now.” — James Crawford
Then, to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we return to my 2009 interview with Max Page about The City’s End. Page traces two centuries of imagined catastrophes in New York, from political and economic collapse to nuclear annihilation and climate disaster.
His surprising argument is that destroying New York in our imagination isn’t only an expression of fear. It can also reveal how deeply we value the city and what we fear losing.
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You might also like: Richard Heinberg, SNAKE OIL & Bill McKibben, OIL AND HONEY, Hope For The Climate Crisis: Michael Mann, OUR FRAGILE MOMENT
Tags: extraction, economic growth, rights of nature, public trust doctrine, James Crawford, The Vanishing Earth, green energy, lithium, 9/11, New York City, World Trade Center, Max Page, The City’s End
Segment One: James Crawford
James Crawford traces extraction from his own family history in North Sea oil to the global economy. He argues that replacing fossil fuels with new technologies won’t be enough if we leave the underlying logic of extraction untouched. We talk about lithium mining, Indigenous rights, the public trust doctrine, successful youth climate litigation in Montana and the poisoned legacy of copper mining in Butte. Crawford finds hope not in returning to an untouched past, but in accepting our responsibility for repair.
Before Al Qaeda’s jets crashed into the twin towers in the real world, millions of players of the software game Flight Simulator had crashed their fantasy jets into the same towers for years. Before that, King Kong threatened the Empire State Building. New York has been destroyed by flood, a sudden ice age, aliens from other planets, anarchists and immigrants and nuclear war — all in the imagination of American writers, filmmakers, and artists. What is it about the New York that excites such fantasies of destruction?
Max Page explores that question in THE CITY’S END: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. Page teaches history and architecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.