Vince Beiser: The global sand trade and how it remade ‘modernity’ (Ep399)
“Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. Even though most of us barely ever think about it, sand is actually the most used natural resource in the world after air and water.”
In this episode, we welcome journalist Vince Beiser, the author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Vince guides us in an exploration of sand as a resource and the ways in which its extraction and exploitation, quite literally, uphold structures of modern civilization. Exposing the multi-layered histories, uses of, and even violence that ensues around sand, Vince calls for an exploration of diverse, plural models that include but are not solely dependent on sand as an infrastructure material.
How does unveiling the economy of sand, in turn, speak to landscapes of injustice, where the clearness of glass as end products juxtaposes the outsourced pollution that exits their factories? And how might our questioning of “how and why” sand is culled into our lives turn our attention to the literal and metaphorical cracks that splinter the seemingly indestructible foundations of the project of modernity?
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About the guest:
Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist based in Vancouver, Canada. He has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territories, liberated areas, no man’s lands, and disaster zones. Vince has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with troops bound for Iraq, ridden with first responders to disasters in Haiti and Nepal, scouted the radioactive ruins of Fukushima, and hunted down many other stories for various publications.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Oropendola
Episode-inspired artwork by Art Twink
Dive deeper:
The World in a Grain of Sand: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, a book by Vince Beiser
Learn more about Vince’s work here
The Broken Earth Trilogy, a series of books by N.K. Jemisen
Expand your lenses:
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Transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Vince Beiser: One day, I just ran across this story in a newspaper from India about a guy who'd been murdered over sand. And I just thought that just seemed like the weirdest thing to me. Why would anybody get killed over sand, right? Who cares about sand? It just seems like the least important thing in the world, and it seems like it's something that's everywhere. Why did this happen? I was really intrigued. So I started looking into it and came to find out very quickly that not only had this one guy, this farmer named Paleram Chauhan, not only had he been murdered over sand, but
Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. Even though most of us barely ever think about it, sand is actually the most used natural resource in the world after air and water.
I call it the most important solid substance on earth. We use about 50 billion tons of it every year- that's enough to cover the entire state of California with sand every single year.
Why do we use so much sand? What in the world are we using all this sand for?
Sand is the literal foundation of modern civilization.
By that, I mean it's the thing that our cities are literally made out of. I don't know where you are right now, Kamea, but chances are excellent if you're in any kind of a building, any kind of a structure, that at least part of it is made out of concrete. Pretty much every house, every apartment block, every office tower, every shopping mall, everywhere in the world is made with concrete, and concrete is basically just sand and gravel that have been stuck together. So if you look at the skyline of any city, all those skyscrapers, it's all huge piles of sand, billions of tons of sand. And it's not just the buildings, it's also every single window in every one of those buildings, every piece of glass everywhere in the world is made from sand, glass is just sand that's been that's been melted down. All the roads that connect all those buildings are also made out of sand. They're either concrete or they're asphalt, both of which, again, are just sand and gravel that have been stuck together. Even the silicon chips that power our computers, the computers we're talking over right now, that power your cell phone, any digital gizmo, the silicon chips in there are also made out of sand. So basically, no sand, no modern civilization.
And the crazy thing is, we are starting to run out and supplies are getting so tight in some places that we're doing massive environmental damage to get the sand that we need to keep building modern cities, tearing up forests and stripping beaches bare, tearing up riverbeds to get that sand. And also in some places, a black market has grown up, right? There's criminal gangs trafficking in illegal sand. And they do what organized crime does everywhere, they bribe cops and government officials and everybody else to leave them alone. But if you really get in their way, and this is exactly what happened to the farmer that I first read about, if you really get in their way and try to stop them from stealing sand, they will kill you. So that's kind of where we are today.
Kamea Chayne: All of this makes me question, why do more people not know about how big of an issue this is? I certainly hope that this conversation can help bring greater awareness on this.
You shared that the process of pulling sand from the earth causes, at best, a little damage and at worst, catastrophe. We've shared multiple conversations on minerals and mining before, but I wonder if you can shine a light on the actual process of sand mining, and how it's similar or different in terms of the range of impact that it can have on local communities and the more-than-human world, based on the different forms and scale of sand extraction that there are.
Vince Beiser: It's called sand mining, the process of extracting sand from the earth, so it sort of fits in the bigger category of mining and resource extraction. It's a bit different from most mineral mining, because there's so much sand and you find it in so many different types of places. If you're going after minerals like gold or iron or metals that we need, you usually have to do a lot of blasting, you have to dig these huge pits and blast apart the rock and the earth to get down to them, and then separate it out from the from the ore, which creates a lot of waste material. So on that level, sand mining is not as damaging because it's much easier to get, you don't have to destroy as much to get to it. That said, because it's so easy to get, the very fact that of where it is can be a big problem.
What do I mean by that? So we get sand in lots of ways. We get some from land-based pits, which are very similar to any other kind of open-pit mining. You basically go and rip up the topsoil, trees, whatever is in your way, strip away the soil and then just start digging out the sand. But probably the most common way that we get sand is from rivers, and the reason for that is it's really easy. Basically, you just all you need to do is get a big dredge, like a big boat, put it out in the middle of a big river like the Yangzi or the Mekong or the Mississippi, any big river, and drop a pipe down to the bottom of the river and it's like a straw, just suck all that sand right up into your boat. It's super easy, it's cheap, and then you've got all the sand on your boat and you can take it wherever you're going to sell it. The problem is, that causes a lot of damage. You're literally ripping up the riverbed.
So, first of all, anything that was living down on that riverbed, any kind of fish or shellfish or any kind of plant life that was down there, their habitat has just been annihilated completely. Also, when you do that, you stir up all kinds of sand, the silt and the muck and the mud and whatever was down there, and that clouds up the water. It pollutes the river water, which can kill whatever's swimming up in the water, any kind of fish, mammals like porpoises that are swimming in the water, they can literally suffocate from all the silt that gets thrown up into the water. Also, all that silt blocks the sunlight from getting down through the water to feed underwater plants so it can kill off all kinds of underwater plant life as well. So that kind of sand mining has decimated mangrove forests, coral reefs, fish populations, and also birds that live off of those fish populations.
Also, in a lot of places, the human beings that make their living from fishing, local fisheries have been completely wiped out thanks to sand mining.
Sand miners go in, tear up all the sand, all the fish get killed, the fisherfolk who are living alongside the river for God knows how many years, all of a sudden there's no more fish.
Kamea Chayne: It sounds like there's a huge range of ways that this is done, and therefore, different levels of impact that it can have. And certain forms are, of course, more disruptive to the existing communities and ecosystems than others. And I want to bring in this quote that you shared, you said, "If you forbid sand mining in your backyard, as many American communities do, then the sand to build your highways and shopping malls will have to be brought in from somewhere else."
And this brings me flashbacks to my conversation with Guillaume Pitron when he was pointing out that clean energy might be clean in terms of not having pollution at the point of usage, but in reality, the toxic mining processes and pollution really just have been outsourced, mostly to developing nations and more rural lower income areas or indigenous territories. I actually noted another similarity with you having pointed out that glass may be clear when they exit factories, but the surrounding air is certainly not clear, and in fact, that manufacturing process results in pollution in various forms.
So just to elaborate on all of this further, I wonder if you can share more about this landscape of injustice that you've noticed play out as it has to do with sand mining, as in who has been disproportionately benefiting or profiting off of this extraction? Where has the mining disproportionally taken place? And who are the communities, and workers too, who have been the most detrimentally impacted by these processes?
Vince Beiser: Well, again, sand mining happens probably in every single country on earth, because there is sand pretty much everywhere, and there's concrete pretty much everywhere, with concrete being the number one thing that we use sand for. So you can imagine there's a whole range of of impact, of how it gets done and who suffers and who profits as a result. First of all, it's different from other kinds of mining, in that things like cobalt, cobalt is a metal that we need for electric vehicles and digital and batteries for all of our digital gizmos. And cobalt overwhelmingly comes from one country, which is Democratic Republic of Congo. So those folks there really bear the brunt of cobalt extraction. Sand is different because, like I say, it's pretty much every country, more or less, has their own sand industry. So most of the sand that we use here in the United States, for instance, or in Canada where I'm talking to you from, it comes domestically, it's sourced within the country, usually. Not always, but usually. So the biggest problems really are in in the developing world, where you've got this combination of really fast-growing economies and booming cities and really slack regulations and rule of law.
India is probably the hardest hit country in the world, India is a place where the economy is growing really fast and cities are growing really fast. People are pouring out of the countryside, moving into cities, just like they did in this country 100 years ago, that goes with economic development. So it means that they need a huge amount of sand in a really big hurry, and in India, they actually have pretty good laws on the books to protect the environment, especially from sand mining. There's really good laws about where you can't mine sand here, you can mine it here, but only a certain amount to a certain depth, blah, blah, blah. But there's so much corruption in the system, that it's really easy for for illegal miners to just ignore those rules and pass around a few bribes, which again, is what was happening in the the case that I heard of in the first place.
So the folks who suffer, of course, are the folks who live wherever the the sand is being extracted.
It's farmers who are having their their fields torn up, it's people living alongside the rivers where the fisheries are being wiped out. In some places, like in the Mekong River in Vietnam, there's so much sand being taken out that not only is it damaging the fish populations, but the riverbanks in lots of places are collapsing. Miles-long stretches of riverbank are just falling into the river because so much has been taken out of the bottom. And people's homes, streets, highways are literally collapsing into the river. So you got that kind of thing going on. In a lot of places, drinking water supplies get damaged, because when you mess with the river that severely, it can really disrupt drinking water supplies. So in some places, conflict has broken out between local folks, whoever was living there, and the sand miners. In Kenya, there's about a dozen people killed a couple of years back, because this group of sand miners came to this area and started pulling out all the sand, really messing up the drinking water. And the local people literally fought back with guns and knives and machetes and everything else, and a whole bunch of people wound up dead. So as I say, it's really a whole gamut. That said, in some places, a lot of sand gets extracted that doesn't necessarily do that much harm. Rip out anything from the earth, it's going to cause some damage, yes. But in a lot of places, like in Canada where I live, we have pretty good rules on the books to limit and to control where you can mine sand, how much you can mine, etc., etc.. I'm not saying it doesn't cause any environmental problems, it certainly causes some, but it's a lot less than than you find in a lot of other countries around the world.
Kamea Chayne: Generally speaking, it is a lot of these nation-state governments attempting to use regulation to address the destructive impacts of sand extraction, that led to the boom of the black market in sand. I'm still thinking about this because I just never would have thought that this was a thing, to have a black market in sand. But learning how it is the number one solid resource that we use, it totally makes sense.
I'm curious, what do we know in terms of how much of the sand supply chain relies on sources coming from the black market, as well as the corners that might get cut, or the workers in places that don't get at least the bare minimum of protection or informed consent that they need, given the hazardous processes sometimes entailed?
Vince Beiser: That's an excellent question.
How much of the global sand trade is black market? The short answer, unfortunately, is nobody knows, because as you mentioned earlier on, the whole issue just doesn't get very much attention.
That's slowly starting to change, but governments, researchers, journalists, all the folks who usually keep an eye on these kinds of issues, most of them are only just starting to really tune in to this particular one. So nobody knows for sure, we do know it's a lot. And I know that it's a lot because I've documented illegal sand mining in dozens and dozens of countries all over the world. Like I say, India is probably the most extreme example because there's so much violence that seems to go with the trade there. But people have also been murdered over sand in Indonesia, in Ghana, in Kenya, in Mexico, in a lot of countries around the world, there's violence that goes with the trade. And for sure, there's illegal sand mining happening in dozens and dozens of countries, including in the United States. They do catch people every now and then digging up sand in places where it's not permitted for one reason or another. It's really hard to get a fix on, but it's definitely big. And the global sand market is something like $100 billion global industry. So it's a safe bet that if only 1% of that is illegal, which seems like a very, very conservative estimate, we're talking about $1,000,000,000 worth of black market sand floating around the world.
Kamea Chayne: I think a lot of people are starting to ask questions like where our food comes from, where the fibers for our clothes come from and who made them, and so forth, and these things feel a lot more direct and relatable. But I don't think many people ask where our concrete blocks or where the sand for this glass window or this glass door comes from. It really stresses how important it is for us to keep digging deeper and asking these questions.
Towards the beginning, you offered a glimpse into how integral sand has been in building 20th-century industrialized nations. And obviously, there's a lot of diversity in people's cultural values and how they define what a good life looks like for their communities. A lot of our past guests of different cultural backgrounds have pushed back against imposed development and dominant visions of progress. And I think a lot of people today are also starting to question things like the American Dream that involves ideals of huge mansions, fancy fuel-guzzling cars, and just really energy-intensive lifestyles in general, and whether that really is the key to a meaningful life, an enriching life of joy and happiness.
But that aside, when we're talking about how systems and infrastructure have been designed or the incentives driving those decisions, a lot of times people might feel a sense of dissatisfaction and disagreement with the top-down visions of development taking place. But given their limited capacity as people often just trying to support themselves and their families inside this matrix, they have to work within the limits of what's already been set up. And many have to climb this systematized ladder, so to say, to increase their sense of security. Just as an example, around a lot of major cities, many of the jobs people need to earn a living are located in the more centralized areas that tend to be more expensive, so maybe they have to live further out. But because of the ways that a lot of our transportation networks have already been set up and calcified and affixed in a sort of way, most people have to work with that and strive towards goals that make sense given this picture that already exists.
So I share this to preface and to ask if you think that a lot of communities have sort of been locked into our dependence on mining and extraction due to the foundations that many industrialized places have already created and locked ourselves into, in terms of all sorts of things, from the building standards and codes to transportation systems and so on.
Vince Beiser:
The template of modernity, which was created in the Western world—with cities, roads, big buildings, factories—has been copied all over the world. That template rests solidly on sand—on concrete and glass.
So to a certain extent, it's almost impossible to avoid. If you want to have if you want people to be able to reach your country with an airplane, you need an airport, and an airport is a building. At the very least, you need a great big concrete runway, and you're probably going to build the airport itself out of concrete, and you're going to need roads going out to that airport, and those are also made out of sand. So, you know what I'm saying? Unless you're Bhutan or somewhere like that, that really cuts itself off from the rest of the world, you can't really avoid it. Is that a good thing? That's a really big question. Even if we wanted to let everybody on Earth live the American Dream lifestyle with the great big cars and the great big mansion and all that, we can't. There's just not enough physical resources on the planet to build that many roads and shopping malls and SUVs for 8 billion people. We just do not have enough stuff.
We've absolutely got to come up with a model of how we can live our lives and build our cities, which is where most people on the planet now live that use less sand—not only less sand, but less of all resources, that's the crucial job.
Bearing that in mind, sand is actually a really good building material, we've got to build stuff. We've got to build structures for people to live in, it's nice to have roads for people to get around on, and sand and concrete are really good for that. The reason that concrete is the most dominant building material on the planet is it's cheap, it's really easy to work with, and you can build stuff with it really fast, so I think there's definitely a role for it. In fact, I don't think there's anything we can replace it with on the scale that we use concrete. I mean, there's other building materials, obviously, but if you're really looking at a planetary scale, talking about trying to house billions of people, I don't think there's really an alternative. And we certainly need to be much smarter and much more careful about how much of it we use and how we use it.
Kamea Chayne: So concrete has various advantages when it comes to its use for buildings. And something that I'm still processing is this idea of concrete actually not being very durable. So you make this remark that "Perhaps the most frightening aspect of our dependence on concrete is that the structures we build with it won't last, then the vast majority of them will need to be replaced and relatively soon. So in short, we've built a disposable world using a short-lived material, the manufacture of which generates millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases."
This sparks several trains of thoughts and inquiries for me—the first one being, and we don't have to get too technical here, but what would be like a more durable building material than concrete? Because for me at least, I somehow had this idea that concrete is quite permanent, at least compared to other things like wood as building materials. And the second one, my second train of thought, which doesn't necessarily have a right answer to, would be this relationship between durability and sustainability in the sense of planetary health. And I'm not sure if I can articulate this well, but I'll do my best. My dad actually grew up in a mud house that my grandparents built by hand in Taiwan because they were a subsistence family. And one could say that the houses filled with mud or untreated wood or bamboo and so forth are not very durable, and therefore, not sustainable in the sense of the health of our lands, but if we took on the perspective that everything eventually needs to kind of be composted and recycled back into the earth to support this regenerative process, then some people might view such compostability of homes as actually being healthier for the planet.
I share this not to say that concrete buildings crumbling is a good thing at all, but perhaps just as a thought of, maybe we have to take into account durability as something that's relative, as in, if buildings were created through materials readily gathered from the landscape, as a lot of homes for more land-based communities are, then maybe their relative crumble-ability isn't necessarily problematic other than, of course, the security of the buildings against natural disasters or requiring more or maintenance and labors of care. But if buildings are made with materials that have been extremely taxing for the places and communities where they were extracted from, and if these materials could also leave toxic waste as the materials break down, I don't know what typically binds sand together to create concrete, but maybe this is where their lack of durability becomes a problem.
I hope this makes sense, what I'm trying to get at. I know this was pretty long-winded, but I'm just curious what these messy thoughts spark for you, and what else you want to share about concrete actually being sort of disposable and not so durable.
Vince Beiser: Like I said, there's certainly other building materials, there's other things we can be building our structures out of, and one way we can lessen our dependance on concrete and reduce the problems that come with concrete is by using other methods, especially materials that there's a lot of wherever you're building. I'm on the west coast of Canada, and we have lots of trees so we have lots of wood buildings. They're actually doing a lot of work right now to to develop something called mass timber, which I don't know if you've heard about this stuff, but basically you take wood and you treat it with some chemicals so that it becomes much it becomes almost as strong as steel. And you can build really tall buildings that are much taller than you could with just regular old wood, so it's a lot more, hopefully, sustainable. The idea of like people just building huts out of the materials that are in hand, bamboo or palm leaves or whatever, if it works, great. I think the real problem is humanity has kind of backed itself into a corner just because of the fact that there's so many of us now. We just passed 8 billion people on this planet.
The thing is, a lot of traditional practices and solutions that work just fine when the population was much smaller, I just don't think they can really work at scale. It doesn't mean we have to abandon them, but I just don't see how a place like China or India, that are growing fast, that already have more than a billion people, just how they could possibly build enough housing, let alone markets and places for people to work and to shop and so on, using the using traditional pre-modern methods, using bamboo or brick or mud, brick or whatever. You can build some stuff out of that, but there's just a lot of human beings now, way more than there's ever been before in history. And part of the challenge is how to help those people have a decent life, because billions of those eight billion live in just appalling conditions, and they deserve proper housing and they deserve good roads and all the rest of it, and I don't see a material that can do that on that big of a scale, besides concrete. Again, I'm not saying we should only be using concrete, we should be using less concrete, but I do think it's probably going to remain the number one building material for a while.
So that leads me to think, okay, if we're stuck with concrete, what can we do to reduce the damage that comes with concrete? And this gets back to your question of how long it lasts. So one problem with concrete that barely anybody thinks about, including me until I learned about it during the research for my book is all those concrete buildings, sooner or later they're going to start to fall apart. So what can we do about that? Because I think one one of the keys to sustainability is when you build something, you want it to last, generally speaking. You don't want it to be like the Las Vegas model where you build a gigantic hotel casino and it's there for five or ten years and then you rip that one down and build a whole gigantic new one that's even bigger and fancier and nicer. That's the worst possible model, right? Much better is if you build something, you use up a bunch of energy and resources to build a building, you want it to stay there for as long as you can. So one way we can do that is use better concrete, developed concrete that lasts longer, that's less prone to cracking and falling apart. And there is a lot of really interesting research going on around that, there's what they call self-healing concrete, which is concrete that comes with different microbes actually embedded in it. And when a crack develops in the concrete, those microbes actually excrete this stuff that fills in the crack, so literally heals itself. I think that's really cool.
The other really big problem with concrete is greenhouse gas emissions. So you asked what's used to bind together the sand and gravel to make concrete? It's cement. A lot of people mix up concrete and cement. Cement is the glue, it's the paste that sticks together, that binds together sand and gravel to make the finished product, which is concrete. So making cement, manufacturing cement is the third biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world. That's a really big problem. So, number one, how so? How to solve that problem? Number one, let's try to use less cement, try to use less concrete. I'm not saying stop using concrete, but the less of it we can use, the better off we are from greenhouse gas perspective. And also, let's do everything we can to reduce those emissions.
Again, there's some really interesting research and there's actually some commercial products out there of folks who are- I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but suffice to say, there's folks looking into lowering the carbon footprint of cement. If you ask me, that's what it's going to take, there's no one solution, there's no silver bullet. It's not like we can say, okay, everybody, concrete's bad, let's all build everything out of bamboo from here on in. Because even if we did that, even if we could replace concrete with, let's say, bamboo, which is actually a very good building material, if we were using 50 billion tons of bamboo every year, which is the amount of sand that are using every year, just imagine the havoc that would cause, that would create its own whole set of problems. So no matter what we're incurring costs, right? We're doing a certain amount of damage to people and the planet. And the trick is, we've got to just keep bringing that damage down to the barest minimum that we can. I think that's really the solution that we should be looking for, not something that's going to solve all our problems, that doesn't exist.
But what we want to do is shrink our problems, the problem's down as small as we can get, which definitely we can make them a lot smaller than they are today.
Kamea Chayne: There's a lot of nuance in what you just shared. There's also the economic injustice piece of who disproportionately uses more sand in their lifestyles, the top 1%, as opposed to the majority who actually live quite modestly. But I definitely understand the more immediate question of how we can lessen the destructiveness of concrete in our buildings, because given the existing unjust picture of land ownership and land access and housing issues, I would say that this is still a very important ask for our more immediate future.
And I also think there are other nuances that we won't get into here, but what I had learned was that building upwards, and I'm talking about skyscrapers, not 4 to 5 story buildings, but building really high locks people who live in these places into more energy-intensive lifestyles just for existing. So whether it's pumping the sewage, or the water pipelines or energy or infrastructure, or getting home through elevators every day. There's also that nuance of another way that this vision of living and organizing society locks people into certain ways of living that are more energy-intensive. And again, there are no easy solutions, but just going to toss all of this out there into the mix of challenging things to consider.
My next thing is, my recent conversation with Rosetta S. Elkin started to touch on the idea of retreat, as in that context, questioning post-hurricane responses to build back better, and looking to possibilities of unsettling and retreating as more adaptive strategies of resilience. And the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people when we talk about sand are, of course, our beautiful beaches. You've also pointed out that in terms of supporting these beach ecosystems so far, quote, "We have chosen defense over retreat."
I would love it if you can share more about what defense has looked like, as well as their costs and long-term viability, and then also this alternative possibility of retreat for better supporting community resilience and the protection of our beaches. From my standpoint, my probably overly simplistic takeaway would be that one is sort of like preventive care and one leads us down a path of problem creation requiring problem-solving, which creates maybe more sets of problems, requiring more problem-solving and continuing that cycle. But yeah, curious to hear what you have to say.
Vince Beiser: Beaches are in real trouble thanks to human beings, as usual. And the reason for that is, it comes back to sand. So the problem is the beaches are disappearing all over the world, they're eroding really fast. And beaches always erode, wind and waves are always washing grains off of coasts and taking them out to sea. In the natural course of things, that sand gets replenished in two ways: one is rivers coming down from mountains, flow across the land, bring sand down from the mountains and carry it out to the ocean, and when they hit the ocean, they dump all the sand they've got on the beach. That's why most of those beaches are there in the first place.
The other thing that happens is ocean currents moving along the coastlines also carry sand, and they move it from one place to another. So in the natural course of things, beaches are always eroding, but they're always getting replenished and there's kind of a balance there. What's happened in the modern era is we've built so much stuff, so much infrastructure, so many jetties and marinas and harbors and dams along rivers and also, of course, all the sand that we're taking out of rivers because of sand mining, that we've basically blocked stopped that natural inflow. So the natural erosion is continuing, but the natural replenishment in a lot of places is not. So beaches are disappearing all over the world.
Hawaii is a really good example.
The world-famous beach of Waikiki is an artificial creation. It was literally just built for the tourist industry. They dredged up millions of tons of sand from the bottom of the ocean, dumped it on the coast, and created this nice beach. That beach has to be artificially replenished all the time.
They have to bring in truckloads of sand from the other islands, from Maui. I'm talking to you from Vancouver, Canada, and in the 1930s or 40s, they actually used to ship sand all the way from Canada to Hawaii to build up that beach. So, we have that problem with beach erosion, beaches are eroding and not being replenished. So that's problem number one- we're spending billions and billions of dollars to artificially replenish beaches all over the world, all over the United States, all over Europe, in lots of places, all over the Middle East. And that's causing that's creating its own set of problems, there's all kinds of environmental issues that come along with that, etc., etc..
But to bring it back to where you started with this idea of retreat, I mean, one reason that we care so much about beaches or that beaches seem so important, aside from the fact that everybody likes the beautiful beaches, there's so much money tied up in beaches. There's so many homes and hotels and real estate that we've built up along the coast that's now really threatened by sea level rise. So we have this kind of this dual problem: the seas are rising because of global warming, because the polar ice caps are melting and seas are rising. And at the same time, the beaches that provide a buffer between rich people's vacation homes or tourist hotels and those rising seas, those beaches are also disappearing. So it's kind of a double whammy. So people are aware of this, right? A couple of houses in North Carolina just collapsed into the sea a couple of days ago, it was in the news. So people are very aware of this. And the response typically, like I said, is defense. Let's build walls. So all over the world there are these gigantic defenses being built, seawalls, concrete seawalls and other kinds of infrastructure basically designed to hold back the ocean. And it's just not going to work long-term. So it really seems like one way or another, we are going to be forced to pull back from the coast, at least in some places.
Miami is going to be underwater in 30, 40, 50 years. And the only way to save all that, all those people's homes and all the real estate is to somehow move it inland. People have got to back away from the ocean. And historically, by the way, people knew that, it's only really in the modern era that people really started building houses and hotels and all the rest of it right up close to the ocean, because historically, everybody recognized that's a terrible idea. The waves and wind and weather, even in places that depended on fishing, they would always build the villages, the places where people lived, were always a bit inland. Nobody would build a place right on the beach because that's just asking for disaster.
Kamea Chayne: Well, given how much money is invested in and held at those coastlines, the top luxury homes, luxury hotels and so on, I'm not surprised that the go-to solution that's been put out has been to push back the ocean. Unfortunately, this could lead to more disasters that could have been prevented, but I think perhaps it'll just have to be a very humbling journey of reminding people that we cannot control everything.
We're nearing the end of our main conversation here, but in a lot of discourses on relearning to become regenerative and life-enhancing forces for our landscapes, there is this theme of reciprocity and healing our relationships with the land. When we talk about ecosystems or for farming, for example, there are ways to grow food and forage and harvest food that involve both taking and giving back, so we can care for the land in ways that enrich them, and then in turn allow the lands to give more to their communities as well.
You started touching on the cycle of sand, but I'm curious whether you see this life cycle of sand that we can recognize and honor more, which can help guide people to move away from this extractive dynamic, to develop relationships with sand that is at least somewhat more rooted in reciprocity. Is this relationship necessarily mono-directional, or are there ways that people can support the protection and even regeneration of sand-based ecologies?
Vince Beiser: Wow. I never thought about that before. Well, I don't know about reciprocity, right, because it's not it's a mineral. It's not like farming where you have this cycle of life, death and sort of rebirth. But I will say this, like you said earlier on, most people, including me, until I stumbled across the story, we just never we never think about sand. And in the same way, we don't think about so many things. I mean, if you look at any material, any physical part of the world around you, your car, your house, your clothes, your shoes, all of those things, there's a story behind them. They didn't just appear in the in the store where you bought them, or they didn't just appear in the Amazon truck that delivered it to you. Whether it's it's the cotton that had to be grown to make your T-shirt, or the rubber that came from a rubber plantation in Brazil or in the Congo to make the soles of your sneakers, or the aluminum in the in the spokes of your bicycle tire, all those things, all those products are made out of materials. And those materials had to come from somewhere. And it really behooves us, especially folks who are concerned about the health of the planet and justice for the people who live on it…
it really behooves us to think about that and to recognize that everything we use and own came at a cost, caused some kind of damage somewhere on the planet, maybe only a little, maybe a whole lot.
I'm not saying that everybody needs to go out and educate themselves about every single supply chain for every product on Earth, obviously, that's impossible, but just kind of recognize that everything you use came at a cost. It came out of the earth somewhere and was probably harvested or mined by by folks who are probably pretty disadvantaged compared to those of us in the rich world. That's just really something to bear in mind and to do your research on and to sort of keep tabs on. The real bottom line for me, when you when you start to think about it that way, like, oh, my God, I need to use less sand, I need to eat less tuna, I need to stop wearing rubber sneakers because of the terrible conditions in rubber plantations. And the bottom line is kind of the same for everything, which is just that we human beings, first and foremost us here in the rich world, we need to use less, we just need to consume less of everything. So any way you can do that, any way that you can promote the idea of a more cyclical economy, a more sustainable economy, a lower consuming economy, that's going to help.
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Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you read or publications you follow?
Vince Beiser: The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemison. She's a science fiction writer. It's not reality based, but, man, it's just such a well thought-out picture of a of a society that has to deal with really apocalyptic conditions, with natural disasters that occur over and over again, and how they deal with that and how they organize themselves. It's just really fascinating. And I think even though it's fiction, there's a lot of really profound lessons in it.
Kamea Chayne: What has been a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Vince Beiser: I'll go with practice bicycling. Why bicycling? Not only is it super fun and really good exercise, but it is a great way to minimize your footprint on the earth. Instead of using cars, cars have got to be the most wasteful, most ridiculous form of transport ever invented. And bicycles are just so elegant and simple and graceful and clean by comparison that it just makes me feel happy every time I'm riding my bike.
Kamea Chayne: And the infrastructure to support people to feel safer biking everywhere also needs to be improved. And finally, what is one of your biggest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Vince Beiser: My kids. My kids just make me happy every day. The world is so overwhelming sometimes and everything, it can just seem like everything's so awful and everything's so hopeless. But if you have kids, you can't give up, right? You can't just say, okay, the world sucks and I'm just going to leave you this screwed-up world that I birthed you into. No, I got to do whatever I can to make it a better place for them.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a wrap here. But to learn more and stay updated on Vince's work, you can head to vincebeiser.com, and we will have more references from this episode shared in our show notes at greendreamer.com. Vince, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wealth of knowledge on this topic of sand and beyond. For now though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Vince Beiser: I kind of already said it, but again, the number one thing that I think we as individuals can do to really make an immediate change that actually matters in the world is fewer cars. Do whatever you can do to avoid owning a car, to push wherever you live to develop public transit, bicycle infrastructure, make things easier to get around by walking. Cars are the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world. Cars use up just unbelievable, obscene amounts of natural resources all over the world. We need fewer cars. And unlike so many of the problems that that that we often think about, that's one that's actually in the power of most of us to actually make a concrete immediate difference with. If at all you can avoid it, don't get a car.
