399) Vince Beiser: The global sand trade and how it remade 'modernity'
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Kaméa Chayne
4.8 • 694 Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
“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 natural resource and the ways in which its extraction and exploitation, quite literally, upholds structures of modern civilization. Exposing the multi-layered histories, uses of, and even violence that ensues around sand as a resource, Vince calls for an exploration of diverse, plural models that include but are not solely dependent on sand as an infrastructural 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?
This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support
(The musical offering featured in this episode At the Edge of It by Oropendola.)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I have a quick but important ask. As you're probably aware, Green Dreamer is an independent |
| 0:07.9 | podcast and we don't take on corporate advertisers to fund our work because we don't want those |
| 0:13.7 | considerations to influence our curiosities or our abilities to question whatever it is that we want to question. |
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| 0:55.7 | You're listening to Green Dreamer, a listener-supported podcast, and I'm your host, Kameh Shane. |
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| 1:06.8 | community, where we'll begin to share bonus episode offerings, some of my own reflections |
| 1:11.9 | on these conversations, and more. If you've been with us for a while, you also know that we |
| 1:17.3 | often explore ideas and perspectives that go against mainstream currents in order to seed more |
| 1:23.2 | imaginative thinking for what could be. So if you value our platform and curiosities and intention and want to support us to break |
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| 1:37.0 | slash support. |
| 1:40.5 | Even though most of us barely ever think about it, sand is actually the most used natural |
| 1:47.0 | resource in the world after air and water. I call it the most important solid substance on |
| 1:53.0 | earth. We use about 50 billion tons of it every year. That's enough to cover the entire state |
| 1:59.0 | of California with sand every |
| 2:01.7 | single year. Why do we use so much sand? What in the world are we using all this sand |
... |
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