The creation of built environments is a material act. Construction is, however, also dependent on redistributions and depletions, as materials are moved around the planet. In this essay, written for PLAN in response to the theme of crisis, Stockholm-based architect and researcher Matthew Ashton reflects on the cost of these movements, offering a cautionary tale of time past, time lost and perhaps also time left in the task of establishing more sustainable relations to our shared planet.
ACT 1: FORMATION
The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.
Heraclitus, “Fragment 124”(1)
To see the world in a grain of sand is to see each particle as a miniature geological cosmos, tracing a path from the present moment back into the deep depths of time, and beyond towards an unknown future. Sand is our entry point into the mysterious world of geology hidden below our feet—it is our point of contact with the creeping geomorphic processes constantly conditioning the earth. It is a material narration of slow violence and unimaginable catastrophe wrought upon the earth over millennia by the constant forces of air, water and fire. Sand is time and memory—it is mountains washed into the sea, the time it takes to cook the perfect egg, the reign of kings and queens whose glorious palaces now lie buried beneath shifting deserts, a young girl’s tiny footprints recorded fleetingly between waves on a perfect summer day, vacation images stored on the silicon chip of a smart phone. Sand is a reminder that the world existed long before us and will continue to do so long after our fossilised remains have eroded to dust.
Sand is, in a basic definition, a fine granular material consisting of rock and mineral particles. Its composition varies, depending on local geological conditions and the circumstances under which it was formed, but the most common component of sand is Silica (Silicon Dioxide usually in the form of quartz), followed by calcium carbonates—the calcified remains of corals, shellfish and other marine invertebrates which have been deposited on the ocean floor over the last half billion years. Sand is one of the most abundant materials found on the planet(2) and is in fact a renewable natural resource, although not at a time scale comprehensible to humans—eroding mountains take time.
The natural terrestrial sand deposits found in Scandinavia, particularly in central Sweden, chronicle an exceptionally violent climatic transformation which took place in the not too distant past—at least from a geological point of view(3). Twelve thousand years ago, most of what we today know as Sweden was still covered by the Fennoscandian Ice sheet; a warming climate was rapidly altering this frozen world(4). As ice melted on the surface of the glacier, it carved tunnels down to the bedrock, feeding a network of subglacial streams, transporting water and large quantities of sand, gravel and boulders, which eventually emerged at the glacier’s edge. Today the remains of these glacial watercourses are preserved in the long, winding ridges (eskers) of stratified sand and gravel that are scattered across the landscape. One of Sweden’s longest eskers, Uppsalaåsen, rises gently amongst the leafy suburbs south of Stockholm, and continues in a northerly direction for 250 km before disappearing again beneath the Baltic sea. This natural warehouse of building construction material is situated conveniently on the doorstep of one of Europe’s fastest growing urban areas(5).
ACT II: EXTRACTION
Amid the wilderness stood an engineer — not an old man, but grey from the calculation of nature. He pictured the whole world as a dead body, judging it from those parts of it that he had already converted into structures
Andrey Platonov, ”The Foundation Pit”(6)
The road to Munsö is pretty. It is reached through one of those idyllic Sunday drives that only take you an hour outside the city but impart the impression that you have travelled to a different place and time. Departing the wealthy northern suburbs of Stockholm, follow road 261 past the Versailles inspired Royal Palace of Drottningholm and its immaculately manicured pleasure gardens. Continue through the fertile green and gold fields of wheat, barley and rapeseed, past the parking lots and the neat suburban plots of Ekerö. The road now begins to climb a ridge, offering a panoramic vista over lake Mälaren and glimpses of the brutalist southern suburbs of Stockholm in the distance. Beyond the pine forest, the road starts to narrow, and the few visible houses appear to fade into the distance. The country air smells of horses, hay and manure and you wind down the window to fully embrace the experience, but something’s not quite right. Suddenly the spell is broken and reality enters the scene—you notice the stiff rows of metallic robot men, tightly gripping their high voltage cables, the thin veil of dust floating above the asphalt, and the trucks—convoys of trucks—each beast hauling a belly full of broken earth back to city.
It’s estimated that one in every four trucks on the roads of Stockholm is carrying a load of building aggregates—transferring sand, gravel and crushed earth from one of the region’s 34 licenced quarries (there are over 1200 nationally) to construction and infrastructural projects across the expansive city(7). Each year the capital city alone consumes around 10 million tons of mined earth, which, as the largest component in concrete production, is used primarily in the construction of roads, railways and urban infrastructure. At a national scale, that figure rises to a staggering 99 million tons per year(8) or around 10 tons of material per Swedish citizen, if that helps to visualise the incomprehensible scale of the entire operation.
The islands of Ekerö and Munsö—ideally situated upon the rich natural sand and gravel deposits of the Uppsalaåsen/Esker—have long been industrialised and exploited for their natural resources(9). Located within close proximity to Stockholm, as well as to other cities along the shores of Lake Mälaren, the islands provide a cheap and easily accessible source of material. In the aggregates business, proximity is everything—the extremely low price of building aggregates per ton, combined with their relatively heavy weight, means that transport costs begin to surpass material costs after only 30 km, and to be economically viable, most quarry sites must be located within 50 km of their market destination. Sand, gravel, and crushed rock are the flour and milk of the construction industry, and these high-volume, low-cost materials are fundamental to almost every construction project, from building a new detached family home to the construction of a mega-infrastructural project such as the new Stockholm ring road(10). The ingredients are the same, only the proportions change.
ACT III: DESTRUCTION
Excavations form shapeless mounds of debris, miniature landslides of dust, mud, sand and gravel. Dump trucks spill soil into an infinity of heaps.
Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind”(11)
The world is running out of sand. The statement is absurd, but the truth is absolutely terrifying. If the quantity of building aggregates consumed every year in Sweden is monumental, then the total yearly global figure is truly planetary in scale. Last year alone the world consumed over 50 billion tons of sand and gravel—enough to cover the entire area of Sweden in a layer 8 cm thick, or to visualise it another way, a mass equivalent to 18 kg per day for every human on the planet(12). We are collectively burning through our natural sand and gravel reserves at break-neck speed, with most of that material being used to produce concrete, which is a separate but interrelated global environmental catastrophe(13). Building aggregates are the second largest resource extracted and traded by volume after water, yet in many regions sand mining operates with very little regulation or environmental controls. In several countries, including India, Indonesia, Mexico and Morocco, sand extraction is increasingly controlled by criminal cartels, who employ bribery, corruption, extortion and murder to circumnavigate what little environmental controls exist(14). The effects of our insatiable appetite for sand are nothing short of catastrophic, destroying entire ecosystems and the livelihoods of the millions of people who depend upon them(15).
Sand is an example of what environmental historian Jason W. Moore would “Cheap Nature”:
Capitalism’s ‘law of value’ was, it turns out, a law of Cheap Nature. It was ‘cheap’ in a specific sense, deploying the capacities of capital, empire, and science to appropriate the unpaid work/energy of all global natures within reach of capitalist power(16).
Sand is cheap because the petrocapitalist political economy demands that it be so, like water, land, labour, and countless other necessary “low value, high volume” inputs that are required to keep the global economic machine running. Profits are extracted at the other end of the spectrum, in the form of speculative real estate investments, major infrastructure contracts, urban renewal projects, port expansions, roadworks, architectural services, project management fees, marketing material, airport terminals, and so on. Cheap Natures are dependent upon extractavism(17)—upon withdrawal without replenishment, apart from the toxic residues left behind and the irreparable environmental damage wrought.
Sand is also cheap because it is invisible, because it is everywhere—we pass by sites of extraction every day, on the way to work, to school, on the train, on the bus. We see sand in motion, on trucks, on boats, in the scoop of an excavator, in the shoes of a child. We see sand in piles, in boxes, in bags, on the pavement, in the garden. It is in our walls, below our feet, in our roofs, in our windows, in our wine glasses, in our food, our clothes, our computers, our telephones. We live in a world of sand, we just need to open our eyes.
ACT IV: REVELATIONS
The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.
Naomi Klein, ”This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate”(18)
Despite the science, the facts, the warnings, the expert opinions, the lived experience, the melting glaciers, the rising sea levels, the thawing permafrost, the endless droughts, the dust storms, the catastrophic fires, the coral bleachings, the disappearing insects and the charred remains of a billion dead animals, we still seem to choose the road to oblivion over making any significant sacrifices to our current way of life. The novelist Amitav Ghosh encounters this impasse in his recent book The Great Derangement, reflecting that “contrary to what I might like to think, my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled rather by the inertia of habitual motion.”(19). It is this form of collective inertia and habitual motion that is now pushing us terrifyingly close to the precipice of abrupt and irreversible climate change, and we have very little time remaining to slow things down.
But slow things down we must. The alternative is not an option. A look at any recent graph of our global CO2 emissions, although frightening, also hints at a solution, or at least clearly highlights the major flaw in our logic—every momentary decline in CO2 emissions in the last hundred years correlates with a global recession(20). The more we work, produce, and expand the economy, the faster the world dies. This isn’t really a surprise, but we need to stop kidding ourselves that we can solve this mess simply with more efficiencies, sustainable solutions, and smart technology. We have been fixated with the qualitative aspects of sustainability for some time, while ignoring the quantitative aspects, and as made evident by the case of sand, quantities matter: 50 billion tons of earth a year cannot possibly be extracted without any significant consequences. Even if that material is extracted under regulated conditions, and strict environmental laws are enforced, and even if it is used to build sustainable urban neighbourhoods, public infrastructure projects and cleaner energy alternatives, the combined carbon footprint of the entire extraction-construction process in most cases negates any environmental benefits gained—at least in the short term, and unfortunately the short term is all we have to work with right now.
As an architect, planner, or engineer, one must begin to ask: is an expanding construction industry really a positive outcome, and in the best interests of our planet? How can we continue to build in such circumstances, when our best intentions are so hopelessly inadequate? Building more with less is still too much for our fragile planet to handle right now—it’s time that we build less, with much less.
The era of Cheap Nature is over.
Matthew Ashton
Notes
1. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535 – c.475. BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who is known for his single work, On Nature, which survives only in fragments quoted by other authors. In antiquity he was called ’the obscure’ owing to his cryptic utterances, fondness for word play and the paradoxical nature of his philosophy. Fragment 124 was originally quoted by Theophrastus in Metaphysics.
2. Silicon Dioxide, or Silica is most commonly found in nature as quartz, which makes up over 10% of the Earth’s crust by mass. Source: Wikipedia, 2020.
3. For some new insights into the conception of deep time from human perspectives, a traditional story by the Gunditjmara people of south eastern Australia, recounting the formation of a mountain following a volcanic eruption is now believed to be the oldest story ever told, as geologists confirm evidence of a large volcanic eruption occurring 37 000 years ago. Colin Barras, “Is an Aboriginal tale of an ancient volcano the oldest story ever told?” Science, February 11, 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/aboriginal-tale-ancient-volcano-oldest-story-ever-told.
4. Similar to what is occurring to the world’s glaciers and ice sheets today as a consequence of global warming, especially in places like Greenland and Antarctica. Fiona Harvey “Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s” The Guardian, December 10, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/10/greenland-ice-sheet-melting-seven-times-faster-than-in-1990s
5. Stockholm is consistently ranked as one of Europe’s fastest growing cities. Mia Tottmar “Unga driver utvecklingen i attraktivt Stockholm” Dagens Nyheter, July 3, 2019. https://www.dn.se/sthlm/unga-driver-utvecklingen-i-attraktivt-stockholm/.
6. Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit (London: Vintage, 2010), 12.
7. Facts and figures from the 2018 report on the sand and gravel industry published by the Geological Survey of Sweden. SGI, “SGI Rapport 2018: Grus, sand och krossberg 2018, Sveriges geologiska undersökning,” no. 3 (2019): 7, 11. http://resource.sgu.se/produkter/pp/pp2019-3-rapport.pdf
8. Ibid.,15.
9. Jan Malmsted, “Från bondgrop till storindustri - teknik- och industrihistoria på Mälaröarna” in Daedalus 2005: Tekniska Museets Årsbok Årgång 73 (2015): 47-63.
10. For information about the massive quantities of material needed to construct Stockholm’s new ring road, see: https://www.trafikverket.se/contentassets/5fd4779c3bfa4adbac7ba1c296598f12/upphandling_fs_webb.pdf
11. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” in Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 101. First published in Artforum, September 1968.
12. See the recently published United Nations report: UNEP, “Sand and sustainability: Finding new solutions for environmental governance of global sand resources” (Geneva: GRID-Geneva and United Nations Environment Programme, 2019). Available online at https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/28163/SandSust.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
13. Jonathan Watts “Concrete, the most Destructive Material on Earth,” The Guardian February 25, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most-destructive-material-on-earth
14. Vince Beiser, “The Deadly War for Sand” Wired March 26, 2015 https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/.
15. See the film “Sand Wars” directed by Denis Delestrac (2015).
16. Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature” in Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 82.
17. For further reading on “Extractavism” see Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism,” Cultural Studies vol. 31, issue 2-3 (2017).
18. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 279.
19. Amitov Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 54.
20. Global emissions data, sourced from: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions
