Have you ever thought… “Where does this stuff come from?”
A characteristic of my imperceptible slide into middle age is fascination with the details of mundane things. Like how the copper wire that runs throughout your house is mined and refined. Or how much sand matters for semiconductors, concrete, and geopolitics. (Cue a classic Simpsons bit).
Granted, I have been like this since I was a child, but at least now I have a career where such attention to detail matters.
If you’re like me, then you’ll appreciate Ed Conway’s book Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Conway is British, and traces the importance of sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium into our daily lives as comparatively wealthy Westerners.
He does this to draw the general-audience reader’s attention towards the real, tangible materials that, through transformation and innovation, build up a pedestrian life in the developed world – living in temperature-controlled homes with clean water and reliable electricity, using Zoom to see and speak with people thousands of miles away instantaneously, and effortlessly going hundreds of feet into the air in office buildings.
Conway also uses the book to draw attention to an uncomfortable fact: reducing dependence upon fossil fuels will require a tremendous amount of mining, particularly of copper and lithium, to a degree never done before and in places that are not always friendly to Western interests.
This book (and the Foreign Policy review) are well worth the read if you’re interested in supply chain, globalization, geopolitics, or energy policy!
Note: I don’t agree with everything in the Foreign Policy review, but it was the most thorough I found via Google.