Extraction to Extinction - David Howe ****

In this book, David Howe manages the near-impossible - making geology interesting. Usually, this is one of those dull, earnest sciences that it's hard to get too excited about. It might be a slight exaggeration, but for many of us, when you've seen one rock, you've seen them all. But Howe overcomes this issue with a combination of engaging storytelling and combining information about geology with how we humans have made use of them and the materials made from them - the book absolutely comes alive whenever we move from how the rocks were formed to how they have been used (and abused).

That storytelling element captured me from the first sentence: Howe had me at 'I was standing on Alderley Edge when I first wondered about it.' I admit that this is partly a matter of personal identification with the story. I too went to school in Manchester and explored Alderley Edge as a teen - I was a fan of Alan Garner, and even (not entirely licitly) ventured down the copper mines that Howe describes.

As far as the applications side goes, we tend to take for granted the availability of the raw materials extracted from the Earth that go to make up familiar objects, but as Howe takes us through the origin stories of brick and ceramics, copper, iron and steel, concrete, glass, aluminium, plastics and lithium and the rare earth elements, he both makes these everyday objects appear far more special and puts them into their context in the bigger picture of nature.

We then get the least satisfactory part of the book, where Howe takes us through the downside of our overuse of the Earth's resources and of the pollution and greenhouse gas production that results. It's not that these are unimportant issues, but they need a book in their own right to be as nuanced as the rest of the contents - having a couple of chapters on the subject just takes away from the rest of the book without being able to explore the issues properly. (There is, for example, no real mention of the need to balance out inconsistent sources like wind and sun, particularly somewhere like the UK, with storage and, almost certainly, nuclear.)

Things pick up again with the final chapter on the debated topic of whether we are now in the 'Anthropocene' epoch, where the reader is presented with the beguiling concept of future geologists finding layers in the Earth that correspond to what humans are doing at the moment. The only opportunity potentially missed here was to open up the debate as to whether this is a true epoch or a geological event.

Every now and then, usually when trying to be humorous, Howe's writing style becomes rather old fashioned - for example 'There appears to be a population of bevvy-swilling bozos who, wishing to show their strength by crushing flat their drained cans and then tossing them out of their car windows lend support to the Yorkshire proverb "Strong int'arm and thick in't head"' - but mostly I found this an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here