Excerpt:
How ‘Yellow Gold’ Turned a Helpful useful resource Beneath Pressure…Sand is the second most consumed helpful useful resource on the planet after up to date water. Substance of our concrete civilization, its demand will intensify throughout the years to return. A state of affairs that generates geopolitical tensions.
To the east of Les Sables-d’Olonne (Vendée), vans come to the Sablimaris sandpit to assemble their cargo: 30 tonnes of sand per skip. The highway is uninterrupted. Sand is the necessary component of concrete . The placement supervisor, Alain Laurent, guides us by the use of the blond pyramids. His voice covers the roar of the sieve, a machine that separates the advantageous sand from the pebbles. Just some shells float throughout the golden swirls. This sand comes from the seabed, sucked up by the two French sandpits Stellamaris and Andrew L crisscrossing the Atlantic. Les Sables-d’Olonne and some of the cities of Vendée are constructed on this sand.
Silky, it slips between the fingers. The rustling of the grains sings the ephemerality of points. Invisible inside an infinity of comparable ones, the grain is the picture of the flight of time. Time eats away at life. Sand is the mud of misplaced time. On the seashores, vacationers go away their mark. Twice a day, the tide erases the steps, the wind carries away the traces. Is the human journey a sandcastle?
However sand is simply common. A single grain, it seems, is adequate to jam the machine. Historic man wrote his first concepts on the underside. Archimedes drew his geometry on the sand. A Roman soldier walks over his drawings: “You disturb my circles,” says Archimedes. The sword is drawn. The thinker’s head rolls throughout the sand, which soaks up the blood, like that of the heifers sacrificed to the chthonic gods in Antiquity. Equally, it is on the sand that Remus and Romulus trace the state of affairs of Rome. It is on the sand of the amphitheater that the first tragedians summarize the human state of affairs. The sector (from the Latin enviornment, sand) the place the gladiator fights befell served as a television and a spectacle. Aside from, isn’t a show display screen a silica flooring? An age-old gesture is going on on the Internet: you erase an internet web page with a click on on, merely as you may sweep away an inscription throughout the sand.
Troopers of latest armies proceed to do their very personal combat preparation in a sandbox. Thus, the ultra-technical military institution continues the gesture of Archimedes. Sand, humanity’s writing desk.
Concrete has been the material of choice for architects for a century. The idea can lastly take type, freed from the determinism of matter. Sand is the correct metaphor for capitalist value: fluid, modular, transportable. An emblem of our liquid life. In Les Sables-d'Olonne , “a country with out stones and with out up to date water”, as a result of the mayor, Yannick Moreau, reminds us, the arrival of concrete heralded the change. The city with such a poetic determine has adopted a uniform construction. Too unhealthy for the premature getting older of the setting up, which has change right into a commodity that is the entire further worthwhile because of its renewal payment is quick.
Improvement is by far the sector that consumes in all probability essentially the most sand. Nevertheless our dependancy goes further. Sand is used throughout the manufacture of paper, cosmetics, laundry detergents, plastics, paints, tires and numerous totally different merchandise. Silicon is the concept for the manufacture of microprocessors, with out which the digitalization of the world would not have occurred. Sand is the raw supplies for dematerialization.
Man does not take into accounts sand any larger than he does in regards to the air he breathes, and however he cannot stick with out it. It is essentially the most consumed pure helpful useful resource on the planet, after up to date water. Better than 50 billion tons are extracted yearly, making it the world’s important mining enterprise. Sand, the model new yellow gold…
(French to English translation by Google)
