We periodize most of human history according to the tools our ancestors mined from the earth: the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age. Culture has been bound up since the beginning with extraction. Among the first materials hominids mined for were red ochre and other concentrated pigments. They responded to the welter of godlike forces around them – floods, storms, shooting stars – by searching the depths below for colors with which they could mark their skin and animal hides, and bring a semblance of order to the world. There is a reason ‘cosmetic’ shares a root with ‘cosmos’. No one bef ..read more

I was always confused about where people left their guns. Most of my days in the Central African Republic were spent on the riverside terrace of the Hôtel Oubangui, and although this was not by choice, it did turn out to be a convenient place to sense the atmosphere of intrigue that was settling over Bangui. It was the kind of mood that excites journalists. ‘Rarely has such a fragrance of Cold War wafted over the banks of the Oubangui,’ wrote the pan-African current affairs magazine Jeune Afrique. ‘The truth is that a front in the war launched two years ago in Ukraine has opened in the heart o ..read more

The original idea, I admit, was mine, I take responsibility for that, and not only for that. At a small dinner party my wife Helen and I hosted back in November, it seems like a long time ago now, several friends, new friends, not people we know very well, were complaining about how much time they spent on their phones, they were lamenting with early-middle-aged fatalism that their phones had long since been getting in the way of their reading real books, of their conversations with their children, of their exercise routines and their work, I remember that what struck me at the time was that a ..read more

My first in-person encounter with the cryptocurrency world was at Progressbar, a hackerspace in Bratislava, on a freezing winter weekend in early 2014. I’d traveled from New York to write a profile of Mike Gogulski, an ex-Floridian ex-raver who’d become stateless by choice and started a life on the margins of Slovak society with his then wife, a cat, and dozens of personal computers. Progressbar was where Mike hung out with other hacker types. They spent a lot of time thinking and talking about cryptocurrencies; there was even a local Bitcoin ATM – at the time a real novelty. Mike was the only ..read more

The trees that form the boreal forest along the Yukon River mark the time elapsed since the last cataclysm. In the wake of fire or flood or axe, willows and alders are the first to root. Balsam poplar grow into the majority after two decades; white spruce after two centuries; black spruce emerge as sentinels of land that has gone the better part of a millennium without great disturbance. Seen from our boat on the river, the passing trees offer a history in the vertical, the measure of years visible in greens from silver-pale to inky dark. We are on the Porcupine River, half a day’s travel stil ..read more

What has been hailed as the ‘green transition’ – the global project to end large-scale extraction of fossil fuels – requires a shift to a new set of extractive projects. Green technologies depend on minerals and metals locked in the earth: lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and, above all, iron for steel. The exploitation, corruption and environmental destruction involved in the mining of these materials are not on the wane. But what can be done to counter the interests behind them? What possibilities are there for a less ecologically compromised and economically stratified future? Thea Riofranc ..read more

He’d called the office and asked how he was supposed to rid the excavation site of monkeys. ‘For good,’ they’d said. The instruction was curt and final: ‘You know how to do it.’ Darmin opened the supply closet, took out an air rifle, pumped it, loaded the bullets, tiptoed to the window, cracked it open, and peered out from behind the curtain. There were a few monkeys in the yard. Macaques. Two of them were fighting over a plastic bag, the others just milled around. He looked for the biggest and found it sitting near the bushes, watching over his troop. Darmin got in position. He could hear him ..read more

I’ll tell you a true story now. I was just outside the house one day, I was throwing a ball up against the edge of the mill house. I’d say it could have been about the end of the war, about ’45, ’46. I might have been around five or six, I reckon. I was throwing the ball, and I looked round and there was a car coming up the old track. It pulled in by the garden wall. Two men got out of this black car and they armed our dad out of the back seat. He was on afternoons, and this would have been about teatime, about five o’clock. And them two chaps brought him home and armed him round – it was a ni ..read more

I first learned about the self-governed community, or localidad, of Santa María de Ostula from one of Mexico’s posters for the disappeared. It showed two of Ostula’s anti-mining activists, Ricardo Arturo Lagunes Gasca – a forty-one-year-old human rights lawyer from Mexico City – and his seventy-one-year-old collaborator, the indigenous leader and teacher, Antonio Díaz. Side by side, in two pictures, the men stared out somberly. Antonio wears a pale campesino’s cowboy hat, Ricardo a baseball cap and a Nike shirt. Posters like these are plastered across Mexican towns, and are constantly being sh ..read more

Bruno had always known the caves were there, he wrote to Pascal and the Moulinards, but the depth of them, their spatial complexity, had stunned him. We never expect the true depth of a cave, he said, on account of our indoctrination, our enslavement to the aboveground, which is scaled to us and above us, scaled to trees, to high-rise buildings, to the industrial dreams of twentieth-century man, and to his military imagination, scaled to fighter jets, and to heaven, to our need to claim something in the blue beyond, a thing we might call ‘blessed’. This vertical arrow aiming from ground to sky ..read more