The Sand and the Fury

Our civilization is literally built on sand. People have used it for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 15th century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution (also, affordable windows). Sand of various kinds is an essential ingredient in detergents, cosmetics, toothpaste, solar panels, silicon chips, and especially buildings; every concrete structure is basically tons of sand and gravel glued together with cement.

Our appetite for expansion, for building, for creation is nigh on bottomless.

And it seems like our sources of sand for that expansion should also be bottomless. There's the deserts of Africa, Asia, North America - even of Antarctica. Heck, there's enough sand in my swim trunks from my recent trip to the beach (more on that material science connection later). But it turns out that desert sand (weathered by wind) and river sand (weathered by water) aren't even remotely the same when it comes to building. As the Wired article explains, "Desert sand generally doesn’t work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well."

That leaves us dredging rivers and bays and oceans for more and more sand, diving deeper ("he thinks the river’s sand will soon be mined out. 'When I started, we only had to go down 20 feet,' he says. 'Now it’s 40. We can only dive 50 feet. If it gets much lower, we’ll be out of a job.' ") and evend destroying entire island ("Sand mining has erased at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. The stuff of those islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The city-state has created an extra 130 square kilometers in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer.")

We need to, as always, remember that building is a zero-sum game. Everything that goes up has to come from somewhere.

And often, there are huge environmental and human costs in getting that materials from that somewhere.