[Francesca] James Crawford, welcome to Writer's Voice. [James Crawford] Thank you for having me. [Francesca] Your book, The Vanishing Earth, opens with a story of your dad stealing a sample of first oil, as it's called, from a pipeline in Shetland, and you describe yourself as a deep generational byproduct of oil. How did growing up surrounded by the imagery and the artifacts of the oil shape your own perspective on extraction? And what made you decide to interrogate that legacy? [James Crawford] I guess, I mean, I tell that story at the start of the book and describe myself as a deep generational byproduct of oil, because extraction was just normal to me. You know, as I say in the book, I ate dinner every night surrounded by photographs of oil rigs and oil platforms. And that seemed entirely normal until you eat dinner at someone else's house who has family portraits up on the wall rather than a photograph of a North Sea oil rig. And I was very conscious of the fact that my father was traveling a lot of the time, you know, traveling to places to work in extraction and was incredibly proud of what he was doing. He came from a working class background, a working class community, as did many people, particularly in Scotland, many people who worked in extraction. Before oil, it was coal. And there's a huge proportion of people in Scotland will have family connections to coal miners. And the thing with coal is no miners ever got rich from coal. But oil was slightly different. Oil changed it for people and allowed them to change their position. And, you know, my father was the first in his family to go to university. He worked his whole life in extraction, you know, starting off as an apprentice engineer for the British Coal Board, working in a mine. He didn't want to work in mining. He then went after studying mechanical engineering at university. He worked in Zambia for years, working in copper extraction, and then got this first job in oil in Shetland. And that anecdote I tell about him stealing this first oil, putting it in a vial, a glass vial that says oil on it now, and it still sits in the windowsill, it's still there in my family, in my family home. For him, it was something to be immensely proud of. And I think sometimes, and in a way, this is, you know, to come back to your question, why am I interrogating it now? Because I've seen the journey that he has had to go on. You know, when he was working there in the 1970s, and just about when anyone in Scotland was working there in the 1970s, there wasn't a sense of climate change, there wasn't a sense of the damage that was being done. There was just pride of what the country was offering up. And, you know, this entire new frontier of extraction that all these people, thousands of people could go and work in, and the excitement of that, and the pride that he felt, and he passed away while I was writing this book, and I never got to fully interrogate this with him. He could never quite get to that place where he could accept the criticism that was levelled at the industry. But as a generation on, I could. You know, I could understand the science, I could understand what was going on. And so I have to reckon with a lot of the opportunities that I have in life come from extraction, come from my father changing his position, you know, the places that I've been, you know, the fact that I'm even a writer, rather than working, like my brother works in extraction, or like my father working in a job that's both very technically complex and physically arduous. I'm in a much more, I suppose, in a position of luxury that I can spend time travelling and thinking about these bigger and deeper philosophical questions, and he didn't have that luxury. His great-grandfather left a fishing community in Scotland to America, went to work in Detroit on the production line of the Ford factory, you know, the first ever production line in history. When he passed over the border from Canada to the US, he was asked his occupation. He didn't have one, but he said engineer, and that helps him get his job. And then the fact that my father then returned to drill oil from the same seas that his great-great-grandfather had fished, you know, that kind of, that's, I mean, it's still extraction, you know, fishing is extraction, overfishing is extraction. So the whole book is about trying to engage with that, and then that question of, well, if at first we didn't realise the consequences of extraction, we can't avoid them now, we can't turn away from them, you know, they are everywhere. And I think that part of the story that I tell, and you know, the subtitle Frontiers of Extraction, in a way I am travelling to some of those frontiers, and they are quite far-flung places, but actually a lot of the frontier is on our doorstep, it's in the air, it's in the wildfire smoke that's drifting down across American cities from Canada right now, you cannot avoid it, you can't offset it, you can't pretend it's happening to somebody else and accept that. It's everywhere, there's no getting away from it. And I guess that's the journey that I've gone on to write this book. [Francesca] You mentioned the 1970s, how your father was not aware, many people were not, but in 1972, the group that put out the book Limits to Growth, did that study, did predict that without deliberate constraint, civilisation would collapse around the middle of this century, and certainly by the end of this century. I think a lot of people are now very aware of the fact that it's not far-flung, it's not just on our doorstep, it's inside our house. There's no way, I think your book shows, to maintain energy consumption, and we'll get to a moment to the kind of techno-optimism that you critique in this book, that there's no way to maintain energy consumption at its current levels if we are not to really run out. Already we're consuming two to three times the carrying capacity of the earth. You grapple with that sense of, and while still writing a book that actually offers a real vision of repair. [James Crawford] Yeah, I mean, it is difficult, isn't it? And you know, the Limits to Growth, it's such an interesting thing to go back and look at, because to read the original book and to see such a cogent, thoughtful, often quite hedged and caveated scientific assessment of the issues of exponential growth, and to see the critique that it faced, to the extent that even to mention it still in certain circles is sacrilegious, particularly among the economic community. And if you're aware of the critique before you're aware of the text itself, you'd think, well, this must be almost sort of communist polemic. What is this? And then you read it and you think, no, this is so well thought through with the admission, the technology, the computer technology compared to the computer technology we have now is entirely in its infancy. It's quite simple, quite straightforward. Yet what it's projecting, what it's working with are the parameters for, you know, continued human life on earth without something catastrophic happening. And for them to put it out there and say, this is something we need to look at, this is something we need to consider, and for it to be treated in the way that it was treated, that in itself, I think, is illustrative of this. It's almost this hinge point in history around the 1970s and the early 1980s, where we could have gone a different direction. And it looked like we were going in a different direction. And it's not entirely clear what happened to make us change, you know, the stock market explosion in the 1980s, the kind of greed is good mentality that emerged, that, you know, was obviously portrayed in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street with Michael Douglas saying that line. The way that oil company executives, the senior, senior executives pivoted because they were scared about profit, about shareholder satisfaction, about growth. And it's this thing of growth that has become, you know, this idea that extraction is our operating system. You know, it's not like you turn off any one of the extractive industries and you solve the problem. You don't, because extraction is how we live. And that's the thing that the book has to grapple with. And I don't have the answers in a lot of ways. You know, in a lot of ways, I'm looking at the problems in all sorts of different areas, whereas quite often people are looking at the problem in just one area. They might be focusing on oil and gas and saying, well, actually, we need to stop drilling. We need to stop burning hydrocarbons. And all of that is true, but it's not enough. We need to change how we think about the world. And I think within the limits to growth, there was that sense of, well, how do, what is economic sustainability? What does it look like? How do we create the parameters on a worldwide scale where we can try and interrogate it? And they tried to do it and they were shouted down so loudly that, you know, here we are 50 years later and we're only now starting to let that come back in. I think that's the thing that we all have to grapple with. And I think that's the most difficult, the naughtiest part of the book is that, and in a way the most positive, because it's not baked in. It's a choice. You know, ultimately economic growth as a concept is only a few hundred years old. It's a philosophy and it's a choice. And I understand where it came from. And I think it came from a desire in many ways towards some form of freedom, you know, freedom from scarcity, freedom from want, freedom from famine, but it's metastasized into something else. And that very freedom is actually going to destroy the capacity for freedom for life on earth. [Francesca] Yeah. It's interesting because I think it's also very tied. I mean, you say a few hundred years, it's tied very much to the development of capitalism, which has its, you know, organizing principle is maybe based on extraction, but it's maximizing profit. So that concept of freedom is so interesting because it's freedom for some, not for all. And another concept in your book, James Crawford, in The Vanishing Earth, is that of the sacrifice zone. It's kind of a global tour of sacrifice zones, places where the ecological and the human costs of extraction are concentrated to serve the demands of the global corporate economy. So talk about, and now you've pointed out the sacrifice zone is everywhere. How do you think about when does the environmental damage become sacrifice and who gets to decide that sacrifice is acceptable? [James Crawford] I mean, I think it becomes sacrifice when you reach the point probably of no return or of no immediate return to the landscape's original function. And, you know, the example, one of the examples of the many I write about in the book, but the lithium mining in the Atacama desert, and, you know, lithium is so critical to the, you know, the green transition to electric vehicles. Of course, it's in, you know, however many billion phones that are all in our hands around the planet every single day. It's almost, you know, an element that was synthesized in the first few moments after the big bang, but almost seems designed for the future and its uses, you know, it potentially would be the fuel and nuclear fusion as well. And one of the largest sources of lithium on earth is this salt flat in Chile and the Atacama desert. It has indigenous people who have lived overlooking the salt flats for over 10,000 years. There's maybe about 12,000 people living dependent on the very, very meager sources of water, which come from runoff from the spine of the Andean mountains. And it's basically snow melt that supplies almost these small oasis times that the people live in. And then on the salt flat that no one had been interested in forever, suddenly the lithium miners appear and they present what they're doing almost like farming, like harvesting. They pump this brine, which is deep in this salt, sometimes a kilometer deep into this accumulation of salt, which has come from evaporation. And then they put it into these large evaporation ponds and over the space of about 60 months, the lithium content in these ponds changes. They change color from a sort of sky blue to almost olive green, and then it's taken away for processing. And then that's what turned into the lithium that we use in electric vehicles and we use in our phones. The processes of that are removing the water from this landscape, which has always had to struggle for water. And many of the people who live overlooking it are now working with the lithium miners. And they're almost in that similar position to my father. What choice do you have? Here's a chance. The villages are profit sharing with the lithium companies, so they can have, rather than a diesel generator, they can have a solar power plant, so the lights stay on at night. So there's a kind of environmental basis to it. But the long term is, how long will the water last? What happens when lithium demands decrease? Or what happens when we find an alternative to lithium for electric batteries, which we could possibly do? What happens to that landscape? It's sacrificed. And it's at the point now of sacrifice. I mean, it's one of the most interesting in the book, because it's at the point where we're not sure what might happen. And the lithium miners are telling me, no, no, this is different. This is sustainable extraction. This is a different thing. We've cracked it. This is no impact extraction. Well, you know, I critique that. But is it possible? It is possible. Is it likely? No. Does the history of extraction tell us that's likely? No. Maybe if it is, then we are witnessing a break from a trend that has been the global trend for a long, long time. But I don't think it is. So I think that's the interesting place. [Francesca] Yeah. And who gets to decide whether it's sustainable or not? That's the second question. [James Crawford] Yeah, exactly. And I think, well, first of all, the Indigenous people whose land it is, and who in theory own it, don't get to decide. You know, it's fait accompli for them. You know, after the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile, there was an attempt to look at Indigenous land use, and in a sense, give ownership of some degree to the Indigenous people. But when faced with what, you know, social anthropologists working with the Indigenous communities worked out would be the land that was theirs, was their Indigenous land, that the Chilean government balked at it and said, surely, surely, that's too much. Surely not all of this. And of course, not the lithium. That's not that's not part of it. And, you know, there's a really interesting thing in Chile that after, you know, there was this thing called the sort of social explosion that happened, sparked actually by the cost of subway tickets in Santiago being too high for school children, that created this almost kind of political revolution, that they embarked on writing a new constitution. And for a while in that new constitution was this concept, which we may go on to talk about more of the rights of nature, that you give legal rights to natural landforms, to a river, to a mountain, to a salt flat, and then you put that, that completely transforms that question of who gets to decide. If the salt flat is faced with, well, we need what you have for humanity to continue to thrive, are you prepared to give it up, accepting that you might have to sacrifice yourself? Difficult thing for a salt flat to answer, but that, you know, that at least would give some legal parameters to it. At the moment, it's just corporations and it's capitalism and it's growth and it's money that are deciding. It's not the people who live overlooking it, it's nobody else. [Francesca] Yeah. And this whole example of the Atacama desert brings so many different points of this into relief, not only the rights of nature, but also this kind of techno-optimism that I referred to before, because the idea is very much all we have to do is substitute electricity for oil and gas. And yet here is the cost of it. I guess as somebody who drives an electric car, is in the process of electrifying my house, is fighting hard on the climate front, how do people like me and the earth itself confront this? Because it seems to me there's a change in attitude, which is what you're talking about, but our civilization depends on energy. So until we get totally free energy from somewhere without any cost, there's going to be that contradiction. [James Crawford] There is. And in a way I don't entirely have, or even have any complete answers to that. And it's not what the book is in many ways trying to do. I mean, I suppose there's two things you can do with these types of book is, you know, here are all the solutions, here's the way through, here's the path. Sometimes I think people do that without identifying the scale of the problem. I think more what I'm trying to do is identify the true scale of the problem in a way that I don't feel like I've seen others do, because it's not that focus in one area, it's that focus in all of these different areas. You know, everything from food production, to energy, to the obvious things around, you know, oil and gas, but also to sand, to water, to the fact that extraction is so prevalent and capitalism and extraction as a combination is so prevalent that it's moved into this final frontier that I write about, which is our own thoughts. Not just our behaviors, not just how we behave online, but actually there is the potential to start extracting what we think, how we feel, you know, emotions we cannot control that just exist, and monetize them, and it's already happening. And I guess in there, that thought, that's the place of change. How you affect that on a global scale, you know, there are anti-extraction movements developing all around the world, you know, and I write specifically about one in Ecuador, and the fact that it emerged out of the willful and completely unmitigated extraction of oil from the Amazon rainforest, leaving, as it was described by somebody, a rainforest Chernobyl in its wake, because there were no environmental standards, the American oil company that was doing the drilling used that fact to not perform any kind of environmental checks and balances like it would have had to do if it had been doing exactly the same type of drilling in America itself. And the indigenous people developed a political movement directly out of that, and became the third largest party in the Ecuadorian parliament, and pushed through the first ever codification of the rights of nature in a legal system in the world, in a constitution in the world, and then just a couple of years ago, forced a referendum on whether or not to keep drilling a very particular part of the rainforest, a protected part of the rainforest, and 59% of the country said no. So asking that question of your population, that's unprecedented, and for, you know, almost two-thirds to say no, let's stop the issues they haven't stopped. But the fact that the question was asked and answered in that way, in such a politically open forum, I think is interesting. And I do also write about examples in the largest oil producing country in the world, America, where that's happening too, where that legal pushback is happening. I think as someone who has a background in legal philosophy, to a large extent, not a complete extent, but to a large extent, I do believe in the law, and I believe in the law's potential here to effect change. And I think that there are the kernels of hope within that, and maybe that's the place for people to put their energies, because it's happening in America, it's happening at a sort of federal level, but also a state level. I think there's something interesting in there. [Francesca] Well, very much at the state level, because at federal level, the limits of the law are being really realized with our Supreme Court that's completely bought and sold. And even here in this country, with that Ecuadorian case, the lawyer who was representing the indigenous people in New York was basically under house arrest for years because of a particular judge. So there are those limits. However, I think that what's so interesting about you talking about that case, it's also aligned to the growth in the rights of animals movement. And another form of law that is being developed is also international law of the commons. And I wonder if you have made any kind of link in your own thinking between the development of the international commons movement and these legal rights for nature? [James Crawford] Yes, I think it's the direction of travel that we need to think in terms of, because a lot of the development of the system that now dominates the earth was about the move away from the commons. You know, it's John Locke in America, you know, talking about the fact that the native peoples weren't making use of the abundant resources. And actually that was a crime against God not doing that, which was really a justification for taking it from them. You know, he believed that, but I mean, I think there was largely a justification and being able to take the commons into private ownership, create a surplus and sell that surplus, that's capitalism, isn't it? You know, so something that breaks away from that, and that sees the common resources that we have. And in a way that, you know, the legal doctrine that in particular, I look at as this idea of the public trust doctrine, you know, which goes all the way back to the Roman Emperor Justinian. It's a really simple, really compelling doctrine, is that as a government, as the governing body, whoever you are as an emperor, you can't destroy the atmosphere, the water, the air, the soils. You can't destroy that for future generations, that is, you know, it's something that as a legal principle, how could you, because you leave nothing for anything that comes after. And the way you apply that 1500 years ago versus the way you apply that now, the law is still the same, the circumstances have changed completely. So the commons, you know, if you think of the commons as the atmosphere, the commons as the water, the commons as the ocean, the commons as the rivers, all of this, all of this is part of that battle. And I do think it's encouraging that there are already legal outlets to fight that battle. Now, whether you can win or not, that's another story. But there are a number of landmark cases that have been happening in America, in other places around the world, that suggest there's a beginning here. There's a way of holding to account, whether it's corporations, whether it's individuals. And that is probably one of the most optimistic spaces, actually, for me. [Francesca] Yeah, and talk about that public trust case that's in Montana with these young people who brought suit against the federal government. Talk about that case and what it means, and the surprising fact that it actually has had some success. [James Crawford] To some extent, I'm surprised it hasn't had more coverage than it has done. You know, I went to Montana, I spoke to some of the plaintiffs, I spoke to the plaintiff's lawyer who works for an organization called Our Children's Trust, and Our Children's Trust is the public trust. It's basically saying children have a constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, and that right is being infringed by continued fossil fuel extraction, by emissions, and by the granting of licenses for extraction in the state of Montana without any consideration of the impacts of emissions. And that's what the case was about, that for years and years, these licenses are granted and there was no consideration of what should they be, and within the state of Montana's own constitution, there was a very clear right to a clean and healthful environment, and also not to do anything to make that environment worse, which of course years and years of emissions have done. So that case comes to court. The state wouldn't accept the facts of climate change, which is a really interesting point. So they were going to, they have to argue, you know, if they'd accepted the facts, there would be no argument about climate change in open court. But there was, and that in effect, that's the first time in legal history in America that climate change was put on the stand. So the plaintiffs were able to bring all sorts of experts to talk about every aspect, the history of climate change, you know, the Keeling curve, the development of the understanding of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and what that does to heat, to energy, to trapping, all of these things. And it's when you see it all laid out in that way, and I would encourage anyone to read the, you know, the judgments, because it just gives this wonderfully potted history with the succinct, beautiful language that the law has that lays out the facts in a indisputable way. And the state did have, the lawyer, Nate Bellinger, told me that they had one witness that they had on hand to testify about the uncertainty around climate change, and they decided not to put them on the stand given everything that was laid before them. So they won their case, and then it was on appeal at the Supreme Court, and they won it again. It stands, that's it. And what, in theory, that means, and it's a little bit like Ecuador, this kind of test case, is that there shouldn't be the granting now of any more licenses for fossil extraction in Montana. And really, there should be a scale down of fossil fuel extraction in the state and fossil fuel burning in the state, because already the judges effectively decided that the levels of CO2 in the Montana atmosphere are unconstitutional. They're an unconstitutional level of CO2. That's massive. That's a massive decision, what that represents. Now, the question is, where does that go? There's at least another 10, 12 states that have a very similar constitution to Montana. There is no precedent at a Supreme Court level within the state in this decision. And once you start moving through, and other cases are going on in those states, is that something that's very tricky, given the makeup, as you say, of the American Supreme Court right now? But those are the battles in the foothills that you need to win before you win the battle at the national level. [Francesca] My own state recently adopted into its constitution the same, it's the New York state. And this is a state that is now has ended its moratorium on pipelines. Its governor is pushing new pipelines. And yet nobody has brought suit against the state on this basis. So this is exactly an area where we can go. But Montana is also an example of an other side of the coin that you talk about, because in Butte, Montana, you confront the issue of forever repair. The fact that there's a pit of toxic water that has to be pumped and treated in perpetuity. It can't be returned, it can't be restored, it can only be cared for. For a book that talks about developing a new way of doing things, when we think about future generations, not just preventing harm, but repairing harm, what does that look like? [James Crawford] It's the last chapter in the book. And in a way, it unlocks and did unlock so many things for me, you know, traveling there, meeting the people who live there, seeing and understanding the true nature of that story. Because, you know, we talked about sacrifice zones. This is a sacrifice zone. But it's a sacrifice zone right in the center of a city. It's unavoidable. You cannot, you know, you open your front door, and there's a gigantic pit of toxic water right there. You can hear some siren wailers throughout the day to stop birds from landing on the water, because, you know, there was an incident in the past where a number of snow geese landed on it, drank from the water and, and it essentially, crudely speaking, melted their insides and thousands died, you know, which was a traumatic event for everybody involved in Butte. And this is an opencast mine that exists because for a small period of time, it was known as the richest hill on earth, the best grade copper on earth at a time where you needed copper everywhere for the electrification of America. So a third of all America's copper came from this one place, a number of people became fantastically wealthy as a result, not so much Montanans, but other people who'd come in, it was more, you know, it was immigrants who came to work the mine, you reach the 1950s, you have to open up the landscape. It was tunnels down into this hill, and then actually take the hill apart. You know, it's the last scraping away of the good copper you can get. And it's bought by an oil company in 1980, just before copper, you know, dies in the open market. This oil company doesn't know what to do with it. And so they shut it down. But of course, they've dug so deep that it fills with water, you can't stop it. It's below the water table, if it rains, it fills with water, the water level rises and rises and rises, and threatens to, in many ways, destroy or environmentally pollute the entire surrounding landscape if that water overspills, the rain reaches the city's water table. So you have to pump it, you have to pump it forever. But not just that, all of the soil in the city is the result of 100 years of smelter dust. You know, as one person said to me, they didn't understand that dirt wasn't yellow. They would play in the streets of Montana, picking out blue bones from the ground, which is, you know, what happens the chemical reaction of calcium to the copper in the in the soil, all of the attics are full of smelter dust. So there's two things you can do there, you can leave, you can abandon that city, although even then, if you do abandon the city, and you let the water rise up, it's ultimately going to pollute the Columbia River, you know, the main river on the sort of northwestern side of America over the continental divide. Or you stay, and you try and fix it. And that's what people are doing. And they were showing me these little laboratories in the city where they've tried to bring back plant life, they've planted trees, that's bringing back rodents, it's bringing back birds, it's bringing back deer, but they're still not sure whether it will hold, you know, can it last? Will it survive? So it's in the balance. But the attitude of the people there, and the fact that there was a settlement, that the oil company that bought the mine was then subsequently bought over by BP. And the settlement agreement, which took almost 25 years to reach this agreement, essentially is an open check for BP to pay for this forever. So you're forced with this question of what is forever? What does forever look like? How do you tell a story to the subsequent generations of Montanans and Buchans about what they're going to have to do if they want to stay there? But actually, that story of repair is the most encouraging story you can tell. And it's the story of our planet. Because as we said, at the start of the interview, we've reached this point where the sacrifice or elements of the sacrifice are reaching everywhere, even those, those kind of green enclaves, where the richest, wealthiest people live, you know, Silicon Valley, which is impacted by wildfire, you know, California is impacted by wildfire, you can't escape anymore, no matter how much money you have, you can't escape the impact. So at some point, we are all going to have to face repair. And I think we can see politically, possibly not right now with your current president, but I think in other countries around the world that there is a reckoning with the concept of repair. And that maybe within some, I mean, it is some of those the biggest fossil fuel producing countries right now tend to have most authoritarian rulers right now, which is about, I think, a nostalgia, a desire to go back to the 1950s, when none of this was a problem. And we were all proud to take things out of the earth, but we can't go back, you can never go back, it's not possible. And the repair isn't about returning us to what we were, it's about facing what we are now. And I think that's the crucial point. And in facing that, maybe that's where we find the new way of doing things, the sustainable way of doing things, because you have no option, just like the people of Butte, you have no option. And we're there, I think, globally, we're at that point. [Francesca] And you mentioned that these regimes are authoritarian regimes of petro-states. So it seems to me that the new way of looking at things is also very fundamentally connected to a deepening understanding of democracy, what we could even call deep democracy, a democracy that's not necessarily representative, but is participatory. [James Crawford] Yes, I think so. And it's participatory, and it's also increasingly bipartisan. You know, that was one of the really interesting things about Montana, which often is seen as predominantly a red state, as one of the plaintiffs said, oh, they watch a lot of Fox News here. But at the same time, they can see what's happening to their ranches. They can see that the rivers aren't producing enough water. They can see that their cattle are having to walk further to find the feed that they need and are getting thinner and aren't as valuable on the market. You know, they can see the wildfire smoke, they can see all of that. And then suddenly the environment becomes a red issue in that state. It becomes something that's concerning people who would never go near the Democratic Party. Suddenly, they're thinking, but I need something to happen here because my livelihood is being threatened by what's going on. I mean, even the fact that your president was imposing tariffs on Canada for wildfire smoke in a very bizarre, obviously awful way, is a recognition that someone somewhere is responsible for this. I mean, in his entirely wrongheaded view of the world, he doesn't accept any of this. It's all drill, baby drill, all of that sort of stuff. And yet, he's having to accept it, despite not wanting to accept that it exists. You know, you can't walk out of the White House and not feel your throat catching from the wildfire smoke, which is caused by a heating planet, which is the result of continued fossil fuel extraction and burning. [Francesca] And yet, of course, he's shut down so many of the federal clean energy initiatives, even perhaps all of them. Well, I don't think all of them, actually, but he's shut down most of them. And so, I think we do come back to this idea that even if those were not being shut down, what your book is saying is technology alone will not save us. I mean, clearly, there is a role for technology. How should we approach technology as an aid in repairing the planet, encompassing the worldview that you promote? [James Crawford] You know, going back to that idea of if extraction isn't any one industry, if it's this kind of global operating system, then rather than asking the question, how do we stop extracting? Because the answer at the moment is you can't, you know, at least not while maintaining anything resembling modern civilization. The question becomes harder and more difficult, but also more specific, which is what extractions can be made circular? Can they be circular? Which have to be wound down and which are simply incompatible with a habitable planet? And then what kind of civilization do we have if those incompatible ones end? Those are probably all the questions we need to ask. Are we asking them at a state level? No. At an individual level, I think we're starting to. And I think it's that idea of what does transition look like? And, you know, right at the end of the book I write, there's a sort of Australian thinker who comes up with this concept of what he calls that it's almost like an artwork called The Great Endeavor, which is this idea about, you know, massive carbon capture infrastructure taking the place of fossil fuel infrastructure, which is about trying to repair the world. Now, it's it's fanciful, possibly couldn't work. I mean, I think there's a lot of issues around carbon capture, although I did travel to see the world's largest carbon capture plant in Iceland, which in a year removes about the equivalent of 700 cars worth of emissions. But it's a proof of concept and uses energy, although the one in Iceland at least uses geothermal energy. So it's renewable. So this idea of trying to develop this kind of carbon capture technology, if it can be done with renewable energy sources on some vast scale, could that be a workable thing? Maybe it could. And in a way, the way this Australian conceptual artist presents it is exactly like those pictures that were on the wall of my dining room when I was a child. So there's nothing terrifying about it to me. Could I imagine my father have worked in in carbon extraction, you know, that type of carbon CO2 extraction rather than hydrocarbon extraction? Yes, he didn't care. He was an engineer. It wasn't about the oil. His thrill was the technological challenge. So if there's a reorientation that's thinking, well, how do we how do we make things circular? How do we try and repair? How does repair develop as an industry? All of these things are possible. All of these things are happening. I think the difficulty is the scale they're happening at. Facing the scale of the extractive industries. That's the massive imbalance. And if that can start to shift, then it has to. And it is starting to shift. Questions kind of shift fast. And I don't have the answer to that question. [Francesca] And of course, there are many other approaches to carbon capture that don't require huge industrial. [James Crawford] Planting a tree is one. That's a good one. [Francesca] Or in general, regenerative agriculture, the use of green concrete to imitate the natural weathering geological processes of capturing carbon. There are many, but I think the larger point that you make here is that it is a great endeavor that we need to focus on as a central issue of our time. And your book is a wonderful introduction to that. The Vanishing Earth Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. James Crawford, it's been a privilege to talk with you about this important book. [James Crawford] Thank you. (Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)