This is the Guardian.

Hello, this is Jonathan Watts. I'm global environment editor for the Guardian

and author of the Long Read article Concrete, the most destructive material on Earth.

I'm speaking to you today from my home in Altamira, a place in the Amazon rainforest,

so forgive me if you can hear some bird and insect noises in the background.

I was inspired to write this article by a conversation I had with the editor of the Guardian

City's team, Chris Michaels. He was running a series about Concrete and he came up to me and said,

would I like to do an overarching piece about the subject? At first I was hesitant because it

would be a big commitment and then I just realized that I've been thinking about Concrete

in different forms all my working career and this was a chance to put together everything I'd

seen in different poses of foreign correspondent. I became very excited about this possibility to

include thoughts I've been having for more than a decade, thoughts dating back to my time as a

Tokyo correspondent and a China correspondent, then a Brazil correspondent and then kind of wrapping

it all together with the environmental specialism that I have now. Three years on I think there is

a lot more discussion of whether Concrete is always a good thing. It's been taken for granted for

too long but what I hope was to take away from my article and indeed the whole series that the

Guardian ran was that there's a point when too much of a good thing can become a bad thing and

that we may be overused in Concrete, we may be depending on it too much, we may not

be exploring the alternatives sufficiently and I think that debate really has started in earnest.

I don't think I've ever written an article in my 25 years as a journalist that generated quite

as much discussion as this one. That surprised me at first but then when you start to think about it

of course it does, Concrete is so pervasive, it's such a fundamental part of our lives and we take

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