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Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist in New York City.
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A huge lithium-mining operation in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Credit: AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd/Alamy
The Elements of Life: How Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium Nourish Us and Threaten the Planet Kerstin Hoppenhaus Greystone (2026)
The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction James Crawford Bloomsbury (2026)
For much of human history, our species has treated Earth as an inexhaustible source of raw materials. In the past half-century, people have taken more resources from the natural world than in our entire previous history. And the rate of extraction is rising as the global population grows.
Oil and gas drilling is shifting to the deep sea — here’s what is at stake
Two books argue that we need to put the brakes on our unsustainable use of resources. In The Vanishing Earth , historian and journalist James Crawford recounts his travels to five landscapes that have been reshaped by drilling and mining.
And, in The Elements of Life , science journalist Kerstin Hoppenhaus examines the three elements vital for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Both books are informative and non-technical primers on humanity’s ever-increasing use of Earth’s dwindling resources.
Crawford developed an early interest in the impacts of mining as the son of a mechanical engineer who worked in extractive industries around the world, from the coal beds of Scotland to copper mines in Zambia and oil rigs in the North Sea. He is far from being the first to raise such concerns. First-century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of how mining operations “urge us to our ruin” and wondered “when will be the end of thus exhausting the earth”.
Today’s industrial mining operations are on a scale Pliny could have hardly imagined, creating vast toxic areas called sacrifice zones that are, in some cases, uninhabitable. Crawford observed this at first hand when he visited the salt flats of the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the world’s largest reserves of lithium. Lithium batteries are used in technologies from smartphones to electric vehicles , and demand for the element is expected to rise 50-fold by 2040, which would far outstrip our current ability to extract it.
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In Chile, Crawford reports signs that the brine that is the source of lithium salts is already running out, threatening the wider ecosystem with collapse. Indigenous communities in the area are also finding that their water sources are drying up as mining activities deplete reserves stored in the underlying aquifer. The vast Salar de Atacama wetland, which is inhabited by three species of flamingo, might soon become a dead zone, unable to support aquatic life.
Some of the most common resources are also the most overexploited, the author contends. Global demand for clean water has doubled since 1960 and it is predicted that, by the middle of this century, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will experience water stress, as intensive agriculture depletes aquifers and droughts become more frequent because of climate change. In cities, especially in arid areas, these problems can be exacerbated. Nearly all of China’s major cities are sinking because of subsidence resulting from aquifer depletion, and water shortages have imperilled cities from São Paulo in Brazil to Cape Town in South Africa. Such pressures have inspired schemes to tow icebergs from polar regions, but none has yet been implemented. Failure to tackle these issues could have catastrophic consequences. Struggles over water are projected to become a source of global conflict: water was once dubbed “the petroleum of the next century” in a report by the investment firm Goldman Sachs.
After water, sand is the world’s second most widely used resource. Crawford finds that it is also being over-extracted, as beaches worldwide are mined to meet the demand for construction concrete, which uses sand as its main ingredient. In Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta, intensive sand removal has caused whole sections of coastal farmland to collapse into the river and the ocean. Sand extraction in Sri Lanka has destroyed beaches, exacerbating the impact of sea-level rise and increasing the destructive power of the deadly 2004 tsunami. In India, illegal sand-mining operations have become so lucrative that they are a mainstay of organized crime.
The end of phosphate mining in Nauru has left behind a barren landscape of pinnacles. Credit: Auscape/UIG/Getty
Oil and other fossil fuels are unlikely to run out any time soon, but continued drilling poses a threat to biodiversity and human health. In the Ecuadorian jungle, for example, Crawford describes how chemicals released by drilling have caused cancer rates in the worst polluted areas to rise precipitously. In 2023, Ecuador became the first country where a citizen referendum voted to keep the oil in the ground, after previously becoming the first nation to grant legal rights to the natural world. Nevertheless, drilling continues for now in Ecuador, which, Crawford writes, has “tied its entire fate to oil”.
What can be done? Some environmental damage is inevitable when natural resources are extracted, but Crawford calls for a “repair revolution” to restore blighted landscapes. There is no such thing as “sustainable extraction”, he writes, but there must be “life … after extraction”.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03506-0
The author declares no competing interests.
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