In 2019[…]we mined, dug, and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. from Material World by Ed Conway
Material World takes us through history and across the world, tracing the journey of raw resources through intricate processes to create the products that make up our world. It is an entertaining journey, enlightening, surprising, and too often distressing. You may think that reading about sand or iron would be dull, but you would be wrong. Conway visits the sources of the materials, incorporates annedocts from human history, explains their social, industrial, and environmental impact, and projects what the future will look as we struggle to keep up with demand.
Sand gives us glass, cement, and silicon.
Salt is necessary to human health but also is essential to the fertilizer, chemical, and pharmaceutical industry.
Iron is needed for steel used in our machines and buildings.
Copper gave us the circuitry to light and power our world.
Oil and gas fuels our vehicles and heats our homes, is the source of plastics, and powers hydroponic agriculture.
And lithium, “white gold,” goes into the batteries that store energy.
The modern world requires all of these materials. And nothing is made without oil. Conway doubts that we can arrive at net zero without a new energy source and he considers the emerging technologies.
These materials are sourced in one country, processed in another, an manufactured into goods in another. It is a fragile web, and a breakdown in geopolitics would threaten the supply chain.
As civilization requires batteries to store power, demand will outpace the ability to mine lithium; recycling to reclaim raw materials will become all important.
Conway believes we need to understand the chain that brings us the wonders of modern technology and life. He leaves us with hope that technology will evolve to a more efficient and sustainable energy source. “These six substances helped us survive and thrive. They helped us make magic. They can do it again,” he ends.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book.
Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
by Ed Conway
A A Knopf
Pub Date November 7, 2023 by Knopf
ISBN: 9780593534342 (ISBN10: 0593534344
from the publisher
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future.
The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material.
In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.
Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new the ground up.
The Literate Quilter 