Free Shipping to all UK customers for orders over £25.00

0 Total items on my wish-list.

Free Shipping to all UK customers for orders over £25.00

Ryefieldbooks Logo

Ryefield Books

Free Shipping to all UK customers for orders over £25.00

Ryefieldbooks Logo

Ryefield Books

© Copyright Ryefield Books - All Right Reserved
Product Categories
My Shopping Cart
Void image

You shopping cart is empty

You may browse our offerings to locate what you're
searching for, then put it in your shopping cart.

Book cover image

Extraction to Extinction

By  David Howe

Usually dispatched within 3 - 5 business days.

Out of stock

£ 8.24

Description

Everything we use started life in the earth, as a rock or a mineral vein, a layer of an ancient seabed, or the remains of a long-extinct volcano.Humanity’s ability to fashion nature to its own ends is by no means a new phenomenon. Silica-rich rocks have been flint-knapped by Stone Age people, transformed into stained glass in medieval times, and made into silicon chips for computers in the Digital Age. Our trick of turning rocks rich in malachite and chalcopyrite into copper has taken us from Bronze Age Minoan vases to the wiring that powers modern-day machinery.Today, we mine, quarry, pump, cut, blast and crush the Earth’s resources at an unprecedented rate. We shift many times more rock, soil and sediment each year than the world’s rivers and glaciers, wind and rain combined. Plastics alone now weigh twice as much as all the marine and terrestrial animals around the globe. We have become a dominant, even dangerous, force on the planet.In EXTRACTION TO EXTINCTION, David Howe traces our environmental impact through time to unearth how our obsession with endlessly producing and throwing away more and more stuff has pushed the planet to its limit. And he considers the question: what does the future look like for our depleted world?