The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  Suddenly gunshots thundered through the house. Preeti Chauhan, Paleram’s daughter-in-law, rushed into Paleram’s room, Ravindra right behind her. Through the open back door, they saw two men with white kerchiefs covering their lower faces. One was holding a pistol. The men piled onto a motorcycle driven by a third and roared away.

  Paleram lay on his bed, blood bubbling out of his stomach, neck, and head. He stared at Preeti, trying to speak, but no sound came from his mouth. Ravindra borrowed a neighbor’s car and rushed his father to a hospital, but it was too late. Paleram was dead on arrival.

  Despite the masks, the family had no doubts about who was behind the killing. For ten years Paleram had been campaigning to get local authorities to shut down a powerful gang of criminals headquartered in Raipur Khadar. The “mafia,” as people called them, had for years been robbing the village of one of its most precious resources: sand.

  The area around Raipur Khadar used to be mostly agricultural—wheat and vegetables growing in the Yamuna River floodplain. But Delhi, India’s capital and the world’s second biggest city with a population topping 25 million, is less than an hour’s drive north, and it is encroaching fast. Driving down a new six-lane expressway that cuts through Gautam Budh Nagar, the district in which Raipur Khadar sits, I passed construction site after construction site, new glass and cement towers sprouting skyward like the opening credits from Game of Thrones made real across miles of Indian countryside. Besides countless generic shopping malls, apartment blocks, and office towers, a 5,000-acre “Sports City” was under construction, including several stadiums and a Formula 1 racetrack.

  The building boom got in gear in the mid-2000s, and so did the sand mafias. “There was some illegal sand mining before,” said Dushynt Nagar, the head of a local farmers’ rights organization, “but not at a scale where land was getting stolen or people were getting killed.”

  The Chauhan family has lived in the area for centuries, Paleram’s son Aakash told me. He’s young and slim, with wide brown eyes and receding black hair, wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and flip-flops. We were sitting on plastic chairs set on the bare concrete floor of the family’s living room, just a few yards from where his father was killed.

  The family owns about ten acres of land and shares some two hundred acres of communal land with the village—or used to. About ten years earlier, a group of local musclemen, as Aakash calls them, led by Rajpal Chauhan (no relation—it’s a common surname) and his three sons, seized control of the communal land. They stripped away its topsoil and started digging up the sand built up by centuries of the Yamuna’s floods. To make matters worse, the dust kicked up by the operation stunted the growth of surrounding crops.

  As a member of the village panchayat, or governing council, Paleram took the lead in a campaign to get the sand mine shut down. It should have been pretty straightforward. Aside from stealing the village’s land, sand mining is not permitted in the Raipur Khadar area at all, because it’s close to a bird sanctuary. And the government knows it’s happening: in 2013 a fact-finding team from the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests found45 “rampant, unscientific, and illegal mining” all over Gautam Budh Nagar.

  Nonetheless, Paleram and other villagers couldn’t find anyone willing to help. They petitioned police, government officials, and courts for years—and nothing happened. Conventional wisdom is that many local authorities accept bribes from the sand miners to stay out of their business—and not infrequently are involved in the business themselves.

  For those who don’t take the carrot of a bribe, the mafias aren’t shy about using a stick. “We do conduct raids on the illegal sand miners,” said Navin Das, the official in charge of mining in Gautam Budh Nagar. “But it’s very difficult because we get attacked and shot at.”

  Since 2014, Indian sand miners have killed at least seventy people, including seven police officers and more than half a dozen government officials and whistle-blowers. Many more have been injured, including journalists. Just a few months after my trip to India in 2015, an assault by illegal sand miners put a television reporter in the hospital. Shortly after that, another journalist investigating illegal sand mining was burned to death.

  Rajpal and his sons warned Paleram and his family, as well as other villagers, to stop making trouble for them—or else. Aakash knows one of the sons, Sonu, from when they were kids in school together. “He used to be a decent guy,” Aakash said. “But when he got into the sand business and started making fast money, he developed a criminal mentality and became very aggressive.” Rather than backing down, the villagers filed reports of the threats with local courts. Finally, in the spring of 2013, police arrested Sonu and impounded some of his outfit’s trucks. He quickly posted bail.

  One morning soon afterward, Paleram rode his bicycle out to his fields, which are right next to the sand mine, and ran into Sonu. “Sonu said, ‘It’s your fault I was in jail,’” according to Aakash. “He told my father to drop the issue.” Instead Paleram complained to the police again.

  Just a few days later, Paleram was shot dead.

  Sonu, his brother Kuldeep, and his father, Rajpal, were arrested for the killing. All of them were soon out on bail. Aakash sees them around sometimes. “It’s a small village,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Aakash agreed to show me and my interpreter, Kumar Sambhav, the village lands where the mafia had taken over. We’d rented a car in Delhi that morning, and Aakash directed our driver to the site. It was hard to miss: right across the road from the village center is an expanse of torn-up land pocked with craters ten and twenty feet deep, stippled with house-sized piles of sand and rock. We drove in, picking our way carefully along the rutted dirt track running through the mine. Here and there trucks and earth-moving machines rumbled around, and clusters of men, at least fifty in all, were smashing up rocks with hammers and loading trucks with shovelfuls of sand. They stopped to stare at our car as we trundled past. Aakash cautiously pointed out a tall, heavyset guy in jeans and a collared shirt: Sonu.

  A short while later, deep inside the site, we got out of the car so I could snap pictures of a particularly huge crater. After a few minutes Aakash spotted four men, three of them carrying shovels, striding purposefully toward us. “Sonu is coming,” he muttered.

  We started making our way back to the car, trying to look unhurried. We were too slow. “Motherfucker!” Sonu, now just a few yards away, barked at Aakash. “What are you doing here?”

  Aakash kept silent. Sambhav mumbled something to the effect that we were just tourists as we all climbed into the car. “I’ll give you sisterfuckers a tour,” Sonu said. He yanked open our driver’s door and ordered him out. The driver obeyed, obliging the rest of us to follow. Aakash, wisely, stayed put.

  “We’re journalists,” Sambhav said. “We’re here to see how the sand mining is going.” (This conversation was all in Hindi; Sambhav translated for me afterward.)

  “Mining?” Sonu said. “We are not doing any mining. What did you see?”

  “We saw whatever we saw. And now we’re leaving.”

  “No, you’re not,” Sonu said.

  The exchange continued along those lines for a couple of increasingly tense minutes, until one of Sonu’s goons pointed out the presence of a foreigner—me. This gave Sonu and his crew pause. It’s bitterly unfair, but harming a Westerner like me could bring them a lot more trouble than going after a local like Aakash. There was a confused momentary stalemate. We grabbed the opportunity to jump back in the car and take off. Sonu, glaring, watched us go.

  At the time of this writing, the case against Sonu and his relatives was still grinding its way through India’s sluggish courts. The outlook wasn’t great. “In our system you can easily buy anything with money—witnesses, police, administrative officials,” a legal professional close to the case told me, on condition of anonymity. “And those guys have a lot
of money from the mining business.”

  Aakash keeps in touch with police investigators and has tried to get India’s National Human Rights Commission to take an interest in his father’s murder. His mother pleads with him to drop the whole thing, especially since her other son, Aakash’s brother, Ravindra—who was to have been the main witness in the case—was found dead by some railroad tracks last year. He was apparently run over by a train. No one is quite sure how that happened.

  Elsewhere around India, many others are trying in many ways to get sand mining under control. The National Green Tribunal, a sort of federal court for environmental matters, has opened its doors to any citizen to file a complaint about illegal sand mining. Villagers have organized demonstrations and blocked roads to stop sand truck traffic. Nearly every day some local or state official declares their determination to combat sand mining. They have impounded trucks, levied fines, and arrested people. Police have even started using drones to spot unauthorized mining sites.

  But India is a vast country of more than 1 billion people. It hides hundreds, most likely thousands, of illegal sand mining operations. Corruption and violence will stymie many of even the best-intentioned attempts to crack down on them.

  And it’s not just India. There is large-scale illegal sand extraction going on in dozens of countries. One way or another, sand is mined in almost every country on Earth. India is only the most extreme manifestation of a slow-building crisis that affects the whole world.

  At root, it’s an issue of supply and demand. The supply of sand that can be mined sustainably is finite. But the demand for it is not.

  Every day the world’s population is growing. More and more people in India—and everywhere else—want decent housing to live in, offices and factories to work in, malls to shop in, and roads to connect them. Economic development as it has historically been understood requires concrete and glass. It requires sand.

  People have used sand for millennia. But only in the twentieth century, with the advent of modernity, did it become indispensable to the Western world. In the twenty-first century, in our digital, globalized era, sand has become indispensable to almost everyone. A century ago, a few hundred million people lived in a way that required a great deal of sand—residing and working in concrete structures, traveling on asphalt roads, with glass windows everywhere. Today, billions live that way, and the number is growing by the day. Sand has become one of the twenty-first century’s most sought-after commodities, sparking violence and destruction around the world.

  How did we get here? How did we become so dependent on such a simple material? How can we possibly be using so much of it? And what does our dependence mean for the planet, and for our future?

  PART I

  How Sand Built the Twentieth Century’s Industrialized World

  Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES, In Praise of Darkness

  CHAPTER 2

  The Skeleton of Cities

  At 5:12 in the morning of April 18, 1906, a titanic earthquake sledgehammered the city of San Francisco. For almost a full minute, streets convulsed and buildings shivered and collapsed. People were killed by the dozens. “Of a sudden we had found ourselves staggering and reeling. . . . Then came the sickening swaying of the earth that threw us flat upon our faces,” recalled one eyewitness. “Then it seemed as though my head were split with the roar that crashed into my ears. Big buildings were crumbling as one might crush a biscuit in one’s hand. Ahead of me a great cornice crushed a man as if he were a maggot—a laborer in overalls on his way to the Union Iron Works with a dinner pail on his arm.”1

  Horrific as the quake was, even worse was yet to come. The temblor ruptured gas mains, sparking massive fires that raged for three solid days, ravaging thousands of buildings and incinerating hundreds of people.

  After the flames finally burned themselves out, a curious sight emerged at the intersection of Mission and Thirteenth streets. Amid the heaps of charred beams and broken brick, a single building still stood. It was an unassuming half-finished warehouse owned by Bekins Van and Storage. It survived because it had been built with a controversial new material called reinforced concrete. The countless tiny sand soldiers embedded in its concrete walls and floors had given it the strength to resist the flames. Hardly anyone realized it at the time, but this otherwise unremarkable warehouse signaled a watershed moment in the history of architecture, construction, and humankind itself.

  Concrete is an invention as transformative as fire or electricity. It has changed where and how billions of people live, work, and move around. Concrete is the skeleton of the modern world, the scaffold on which so much else is built. It gives us the power to dam enormous rivers, erect buildings of Olympian height, and travel to all but the remotest corners of the world with an ease that would astonish our ancestors. Measured by the number of lives it touches, concrete is easily the most important man-made material ever invented.

  This world-transforming substance is composed mainly of the simplest, most commonplace ingredients: gravel and sand. Concrete, in fact, is the primary driver of the global sand crisis; we use far more sand to make concrete than for any other purpose. Billions of tons of sand and gravel are unearthed every year and pressed into service to form shopping malls, freeways, dams, and airports. The whole substrate of the world we live in rests on the shoulders of that vast infantry of miniature stones.

  All of which is even more amazing when you consider that only a little over a century ago, we barely used concrete at all.

  Let’s clear up one thing right away: Cement is not the same thing as concrete. Cement is an ingredient of concrete. It’s the glue that binds the gravel and sand together. Cements (there are many forms) are typically made by crushing up clay, lime, and other minerals, firing them in a kiln at temperatures up to 2,700 degrees, then milling the result into a silky-fine gray powder. Mix that powder with water and you get a paste. The paste doesn’t simply dry, like mud; it “cures,” meaning the powder’s molecules bond together via a process called hydration, its chemical components gripping each other ever tighter, making the resulting substance extremely strong. Reinforced with a platoon of sand, that paste thickens into mortar, the stuff used to hold bricks together.

  Concrete is made by adding “aggregate”—sand and gravel—to the mix of cement and water. Typical concrete is about 75 percent aggregate, 15 percent water, and 10 percent cement. Combine those materials, and the result is a gloopy gray liquid that can be poured into virtually any shape. As the cement cures, it binds to the aggregate, locking the grains together like a zillion tiny bricks and hardening the whole mess into solid artificial stone.

  Though concrete is the quintessential modern building material, people in several places over the centuries have stumbled on the trick of making it. The Mayans, who flourished 2,000 years ago in what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, made crude concrete beams to support some of their buildings.2 The Greeks used cement mortars. (Some scholars believe the ancient Egyptians used a form of concrete in the building of pyramids, though most disagree. The Egyptians almost certainly did use sand, though, to help their bronze saws cut through stone for their monuments,3 likely including the pyramids. Sand, in fact, has been used for construction since at least 7000 BCE, by ancient peoples who mixed it with mud to make crude bricks.) But by far the most enthusiastic and technically sophisticated users of concrete in the ancient world were the Romans.

  It’s not clear exactly when or how the Romans figured out the secret of concrete making. The task was certainly made easier by their lucky discovery of a type of naturally occurring cement in Pozzuoli, near Naples.4 The earliest known Roman concrete dates back to the third century BCE.5 “The Romans recognized the potential of this material and would use it with gusto throughout their empire until its fall in the fifth century,” writes author Robert Courlan
d in Concrete Planet.6 “They systematized its production and application and were the first people to utilize concrete as we do today: putting it into large molds to create a strong monolithic architectural unit.” (The Romans didn’t use the term concrete, though it is derived from the Latin concretus, meaning brought together or congealed.)

  Roman engineers developed sophisticated techniques to improve on basic concrete. Concrete shrinks as it hardens, which can cause it to crack. Water seeping into the cracks expands when it freezes, widening those cracks and further weakening the concrete. Adding horsehair helped with shrinkage, the Romans found, and putting a bit of blood or animal fat in the mix helped the concrete withstand the effects of freezing water.7

  The Romans built houses, shops, public buildings, and baths from concrete. The breakwaters, towers, and other structures that made up the colossal man-made harbor of Caesarea,8 in what is now Israel, were built with concrete, as was the foundation of the Colosseum, along with countless bridges and aqueducts9 across the empire. Most famously, Rome’s Pantheon, built nearly 2,000 years ago, is roofed with a spectacular concrete dome—still the biggest concrete structure without reinforcing steel in the world.

  Like so much other knowledge the Romans had accumulated, though, the science and technology of concrete faded from memory as the empire slowly crumbled over the centuries that followed. “Perhaps the material was lost because it was industrial in nature and needed an industrial empire to support it,” writes scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik in Stuff Matters. “Perhaps it was lost because it was not associated with a particular skill or craft, such as ironmongery, stonemasonry, or carpentry, and so was not handed down as a family trade.”10 Whatever the reasons, the result was striking: “There were no concrete structures built for more than a thousand years after the Romans stopped making it,” notes Miodownik.