The World in a Grain Quotes

“Concrete is an invention as transformative as fire or electricity. It has changed where and how billions of people live, work, and move around. Concrete is the skeleton of the modern world, the scaffold on which so much else is built. It gives us the power to dam enormous rivers, erect buildings of Olympian height, and travel to all but the remotest corners of the world with an ease that would astonish our ancestors. Measured by the number of lives it touches, concrete is easily the most important man-made material ever invented.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Nothing is built on stone;
all is built on sand, but we must
build as if the sand were stone. —JORGE LUIS BORGES,
In Praise of Darkness”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“﴿في النهاية، هناك حل واحد طويل الأمد: يجب أن يبدأ الإنسان بتقليل استخدامهم للرمل. ومن أجل ذلك، علينا أ، نبدأ بتقليل استخدامنا لكل شيء.
لعلّك سمعت هذا من قبل. البشر يستنزفون الأرض بوتيرة سريعة. نحن نعيش بطريقة تتجاوز مواردنا البيئية إلى حد بعيد. نحن نحرق الكثير جدا من النفط، ونصطاد الكثير جدا من السمك، ونقطع الكثير جدا من الأخشاب، ونضخ الكثير جدا من المياه العذبَة. نحن نستخدم الكثير جدا من الفوسفور. إنه مكوّن حاسم في أسمدة المحاصيل نحصل عليه من أنواع معينة فقط من الصخور، والموجود من هذه الصخور أوشك على النفاذ.
هناك سلع أخرى أوشكت على النفاذ أيضا لم تسمع عنها أبدًا ولكنك تعتمد عليهَا يوميا. تستخدم أدوات اليوم ذات التقنية العالية، من الهواتف الذكية إلى الألواح الشمسية، مجموعَة من المعادن النادرة الغامضة مثل التانتالوم والديسبروسيوم. هناك مصادر قليلة جدا لمعظم تلك المواد، والإمدادات تصبح محدودة بصورة تدعو للقلق، كما يفصل ديفيد إس أبراهام في كتابه عناصر القوة. يكتب أبراهام، "إن مستقل بضائعنا ذات التقنية العالية قد لا يقع في حدود عقولنا، وإنما في قدرتنا على تأمين المكونات لإنتاجهَا ... إن براعتنا ستتخطى قريبا إمداداتنا من الموارد" ⁅261-262⁆
....
الرمل هو مظهر واحد فقط، عنصر واحد من مشكلة الاستهلاك المفرط الأهم بكثير. تذكر أن رمل الكوارتز هو ربما المادة الأكثر وفرة على سطح الأرض. إذا كانت تلك المادة تنفد من أيدينَا، فنحن بحاجة حقا لأن نعيد التفكير بالكيفية التي نستخدم بها كل شيء. ⁅267⁆﴾
العالم في حبة رمل، فينس بيسر .”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“It’s flat-out impossible to extract those resources from the reluctant earth without inflicting some damage, without making some changes to the natural world. It’s dishonest or naive to pretend even a fraction of the 7 billion of us can have any sort of reasonable standard of living without doing any harm to the planet. So the question really is, how far are we willing to go? How much damage are we willing to do, and where, and to what?”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Glass can be effectively recycled (a New Zealand beer company has even developed a machine to convert bottles directly into beach-ready sand),”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The same process is happening all over California and in many other places. The distances sand is hauled are increasing as quarries close to the big cities become depleted or are forced to close. About 80 percent of aggregates are hauled by truck; the rest goes by rail or barge. California officials estimate that if the average hauling distance for sand and gravel increases from twenty-five miles to fifty, trucks will burn through nearly 50 million more gallons of diesel fuel every year in the state alone, spewing more than half a million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.7 Not to mention all the extra traffic and wear and tear on highways.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Vaclav Smil estimates that worldwide, as much as 100 billion tons of poorly manufactured concrete—buildings, roads, bridges, dams, everything—may need to be replaced in the coming decades. That will take trillions of dollars, and billions of tons of new sand.30 “Almost all the concrete structures you see today are doomed to a limited life span,” writes Robert Courland. “Hardly any of the concrete structures that now exist are capable of enduring two centuries, and many will begin disintegrating after fifty years. In short, we have built a disposable world using a short-lived material, the manufacture of which generates millions of tons of greenhouse gases. Most of the concrete structures built at the beginning of the twentieth century have begun falling apart, and most will be, or already have been, demolished.”31 We have built our world out of sand in the form of concrete—and it is starting to crumble.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Bringing them up to current standards would cost tens of billions of dollars. Despite this, they don’t get a lot of attention from overstretched state inspectors. Nationwide, there’s only one safety inspector for every 205 dams. As of 2013, according to ASCE, South Carolina had only two people monitoring all of its 2,380 dams, and one of them was part-time.27 So it was as unsurprising as it was tragic when in 2015 heavy rain collapsed 36 of the state’s dams. As many as nineteen people were killed in the resultant flooding, according to The New York Times.28 Scores of other dams around the country have failed since 2010. All told, hundreds of Americans are killed or injured each year due to the failure of the nation’s sand-based roads, bridges, and dams.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that as of 2015 some 15,500 dams should be considered “high hazard potential”—meaning a failure would cause deaths.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“That’s a fact the United States is learning the hard way. The most recent report on America’s infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s roads a grade of D. One-fifth of America’s highways and one-third of its urban roads are in “poor” condition, inflicting $112 billion worth of extra repair and operating costs on American drivers.25 According to the Federal Highway Administration, nearly one-quarter of all America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The “city” of Kangbashi, for instance, sits on the edge of the Inner Mongolian desert. It was built from scratch in 2004. Architecturally speaking, it’s impressive, or at least ambitious. It features a meticulously landscaped central plaza more than a mile in length, along which sits a library shaped like a trio of enormous shelved books, a museum shaped like a cross between a peanut and a bronze beanbag, and an art gallery vaguely modeled on a pair of yurts. Wide avenues lead to shopping malls, hotels, and high-rise housing developments. The city was built to house more than a million residents. But when I was there in spring of 2016, it held barely one-tenth that number.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“the infamous Three Gorges Dam, the biggest civil engineering project in history, a leviathan comprising more than 35 million cubic yards of concrete.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Beach sands are home to a multitude of other creatures, above and below sea level. Besides the obvious visible ones—clams, crabs, birds, plants—they also shelter all kinds of nematodes, flatworms, bacteria, and other organisms so small they live on the surface of individual sand grains. Despite their tiny size, many of these creatures play an important role in the ecosystem, breaking down organic matter and providing food for other creatures, including fish.43 Dumping thousands of tons of imported sand on top of these organisms can be lethal to them. A 2016 University of California study found the population of marine worms and other invertebrates on San Diego beaches fell by half after a beach nourishment project.44 Another recent study in South Carolina found major drops in populations of bugs, worms, and other organisms living on the ocean floor in areas that had been dredged for beach nourishment.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Nourishment, though, is not a cure for beach erosion; it’s a treatment, one that must be repeated regularly. Few replenished beaches last longer than five years or so before they have to be fattened up again. Dozens of Florida beaches have been nourished again and again by now, some as many as eighteen times. More than a quarter of a billion cubic yards of sand have gone into the effort. New Jersey’s Ocean City Beach has been replenished thirty-eight times, and Virginia Beach, Virginia, more than fifty times.41 It’s an expensive process. Nourishing a beach can cost up to $10 million per mile.42 Broward County alone spent more than $100 million replenishing its twenty-four miles of beach in a multiyear project launched in 2015. More than a few individual beaches, such as Atlantic City, have already racked up tabs of well over $100 million by themselves.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“In 1916, Fisher opened another continent-straddling road, the Dixie Highway, linking the Midwest to Florida. As intended, it brought more visitors to the state. Fort Lauderdale opened its first tourist hotel in 1919.26 Fisher was after a bigger prize, though. He set his sights farther south, buying up hundreds of acres of sand-fringed swampland near Miami. “Fisher’s Folly was a vermin-infested swamp on the ocean side of Biscayne Bay,” writes T. D. Allman in Finding Florida. “This boggy wilderness, he decided, was going to be to people with automobiles what Palm Beach was to those with private railroad cars.”27 Fisher tore up the mangroves, dredged millions of tons of sand and mud up from the bay, filled in his land until it was solid enough to be built on, and proclaimed it Miami Beach.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The beach thus began as a non-place, a void, and it has remained so ever since. From the start its emptiness, its artificial desertification, has been part of its appeal,” writes Gillis. “The appeal of the beach lies in the fact that it excludes all that is ‘workful.’ Its true relation to nature and history must always be concealed, for it functions in modern culture as a primary place of getting away, of oblivion and forgetting.”21”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Still, the beach itself continued to be viewed with suspicion. Seaside towns like the New Jersey Shore’s Atlantic City and the French Riviera’s Nice built boardwalks and piers so that visitors could enjoy the sights of the shore without having to actually set foot on its smelly, seaweed-strewn sands.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Which leaves many towns in southern Florida no choice but to dig their sand from inland quarries and haul it to the coast one roaring, diesel-spewing truck at a time. Tourists and locals hate the noise and traffic, and county officials hate the extra cost, which can be easily double that of dredged sand. But it does have some advantages. The inland mines, with their elaborate sorting and washing machines, can deliver sand of a precise spec—the exact size, shape, and color county officials deem appropriate for the beach. Beach town residents and tourists alike are very particular about the color and consistency of their beaches. The sugary white-sand beach has become the global standard of perfection, and any resort falling short of it loses points. (That’s nothing compared to the fussiness of Olympic beach volleyball players. To make sure their bare feet come into contact only with grains of just the right size and shape, sand was brought in from Hainan Island for the 2008 Beijing Games, and from a quarry in Belgium for the 2004 Athens Games.)15 “You pump sand from the ocean floor, you don’t know what you’re getting,” said Eastman. That’s not exactly true; sea sand is examined closely to make sure it is suitable for a given beach before the regulatory agencies will allow it to be dredged for nourishment. But land-mined sand can be sorted, sifted, and cleaned to a uniform standard. The grains that Eastman was emplacing were all about the size of a salt grain, all the same silver gray, unadulterated with stones or shell fragments. Their color was approved using the Munsell color order system, a visual index of hues created in 1915. The sand is tested at the mine, at every 3,000 tons, and every 500 yards on the beach after it’s in place to make sure it’s up to spec. The waves will gradually mix in shells and other organic matter, so in a few months it won’t look as obviously artificial as it does now.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“It’s a lucrative business. Eastman is a compact, middle-aged guy with a weather-beaten face adorned with a scrap of white beard and mustache. He tops it all off with a cowboy-hat-shaped hard hat. Eastman’s father was in the construction business, and Eastman and his three brothers grew up greasing the trucks. By his own account, Eastman barely graduated from high school. But he took a bunch of night courses to learn things like project estimating, and started his own contracting business in 1994. His company did all kinds of contracting work, including a little beach renourishment, until the real estate market crash in 2006. Eastman realized that he would do better to rely on the steady forces of erosion and the government funding earmarked to fight it than to tie his fortunes to the vicissitudes of the real estate market. “When the market dried up, we reinvented ourselves,” he says. Today Eastman Aggregate Enterprises does nothing but beach nourishment, all over Florida and in neighboring states. Eastman has five of his own trucks and forty-plus people working for him. His company hauls in about $15 million per year.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“(Among its many oddly colored beaches, Hawaii boasts a particularly rare one on the island of Kauai called Glass Beach. Much of its sand is made up of millions of colorful pieces of long-eroded glass.)”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“For decades, Broward County, in which Fort Lauderdale sits, solved its vanishing beach problem by replacing the sand swept off its shoreline with replacement troops dredged up from the nearby ocean floor. But by now virtually all of its accessible undersea sand has been used up. For that matter, the same goes for Miami Beach, Palm Beach, and many other beach-dependent Florida towns. Nearly half of the state’s beaches are officially designated as “critically eroding.”1 Nicole Sharp, Broward County’s natural resources administrator, summed it up: “We are running out of sand in Florida.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“That’s the course of human history. Cities, highways, factories, modern civilization require tearing up land and displacing people and other living things. It’s impossible to get the resources we need to live as we do without disturbing at least some people and doing some harm to—or at least changing—the natural environment. Civilization disrupts the natural world. We disrupt the natural world. But we’re not going to go back to living in caves. We’re not going to stop cutting down trees or damming rivers or, least of all, digging up sand. The challenge is to figure out ways to do those things that are responsible, sustainable, and limited. We have to do as little of them as we can get away with. In the specific case of frac sand, though, there’s a valid argument to be made that we shouldn’t be doing it at all, because fracking itself is especially fraught with serious environmental hazards. There are plenty of reports of fracking operations contaminating aquifers and even causing earthquakes, as well as possibly elevating the risk of cancer and silicosis among people living near them.27 What’s more, society doesn’t necessarily need the oil and gas it yields. In an ideal world, it could be replaced with solar and wind power.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Dennis and Darlene aren’t greed-blinded corporate patsies. They’ve just looked at the evidence and their own situation and reached a different conclusion than Trinko or Schmitt. “So many studies have been done,” says Darlene. “They haven’t got one documented thing to show one person got silicosis from working in these mines.” (This is true, although as scientists are fond of saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Symptoms of silicosis can take ten to fifteen years to develop.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The Chippewa Sand Company wouldn’t let me see its operation. In fact, when I parked outside their gates to snap a few pictures, a worker came out to tell me I wasn’t even allowed to stop there. (Remember Unimin, the giant mining company that gave me a similar reception in North Carolina? They’re also big players in Wisconsin. In fact, Unimin is the biggest frac sand producer in the world.)”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The quartz sands under the ground of western and central Wisconsin5 have just that rare combination. These are ancient grains that were eroded, transported, then buried and uplifted again. Generally speaking, the older a grain is, the more rounded it is, thanks to however many extra million years of having its angles and edges worn down. Wisconsin also happens to have an excellent rail network and relatively lax environmental regulations. And so the fracking boom has sparked a frac-sand boom in the Badger State. Thousands of acres of the state’s farmland and forest are being torn up to get at the precious silica below.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Thanks to the fracking boom, which kicked into high gear in 2008, the United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s biggest oil and gas producer. None of this could happen without sand.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The result is what Unimin markets as Iota quartz, the industry standard of purity. The basic Iota quartz is 99.998 percent pure SiO2. It is used to make things like halogen lamps and photovoltaic cells, but it’s not good enough to make those crucibles in which polysilicon is melted. For that you need Iota 6, or the tip-top of the line, Iota 8, which clocks in at 99.9992 percent purity—meaning for every one billion molecules of SiO2, there are only eighty molecules of impurities.18 Iota 8 sells for up to $10,000 a ton. Regular construction sand, at the other end of the sand scale, can be had for a few dollars per ton.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“That’s frustratingly common. “I’ve evaluated thousands of quartz samples from all over the world,” said John Schlanz, chief minerals processing engineer at the Minerals Research Laboratory in Asheville, about an hour from Spruce Pine. “Near all of them have contaminate locked in the quartz grains that you can’t get out.” Some Spruce Pine quartz is flawed in this way. Those grains, the washouts from the Delta Force of the quartz selection process, are used for high-end beach sand and golf course bunkers—most famously the salt-white traps of Augusta National Golf Club,16 site of the iconic Masters Tournament. A golf course in the oil-drunk United Arab Emirates imported 4,000 tons of this sand in 2008 to make sure its sand traps were world-class, too.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The next step is to melt down the polysilicon. But you can’t just throw this exquisitely refined material in a cook pot. If the molten silicon comes into contact with even the tiniest amount of the wrong substance, it causes a ruinous chemical reaction. You need crucibles made from the one substance that has both the strength to withstand the heat required to melt polysilicon, and a molecular composition that won’t infect it. That substance is pure quartz.12 This is where Spruce Pine quartz comes in. It’s the world’s primary source of the raw material needed to make the fused-quartz crucibles in which computer-chip-grade polysilicon is melted. A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high-purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry.13”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization