Look around you, says David Howe, and just about everything that you can see that’s a product of human agency (unless you can eat it) will almost inevitably at some point have been brought to you by a geologist. From the scratch-resistant screen on your smartphone to the ceramic cup your coffee’s in, from the bricks and steel used to construct the building you’re sitting in to the fuel that powers your car, it all started off as a rock or mineral vein, a layer of ancient seabed or the remains of a dormant volcano.
Living in the Anthropocene era of geological time – in other words the two hundred thousand years or so that humans have had an impact on the planet – comes with a long bill of costs for the environment. One of the items on the invoice is the sheer amount of digging we do, scouring away at the surface of planet Earth. Howe’s ‘Extraction to Extinction’ (Saraband, £9.99, ISBN 9781913393274) looks at what the environmental cost is so far and examines...