The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  It’s hard to imagine that actually happening, though. So far we have chosen defense over retreat. Miami Beach is investing $400 million in building seawalls, elevating streets, and installing pumps to combat an anticipated increase in flooding caused by the rising ocean. Around the world, coastal cities like Jakarta, Indonesia, and Bangkok, Thailand, are spending billions on giant seawalls and other protective measures.

  In retrospect, it was obviously folly to build so much so close to the ocean’s edge. But now there are millions of people and billions of dollars worth of buildings in place; how could we undo all that? No one knows, and few are asking. Which leaves us more or less obliged to keep rebuilding beaches, both as defenses against the ocean and magnets for tourists. The question is, how long can we keep it up before either the money or the sand runs out?

  Mike Jenkins is a lean, fortyish coastal engineer with Applied Technology & Management, an engineering firm specializing in seaside structures like marinas and artificial islands. He has also overseen lots of beach nourishment projects. He knows far better than most what the challenges are.

  “At some point, it is unsustainable,” he said in a conference room of his company’s headquarters in West Palm Beach. “Now, that might be a hundred years away, or two hundred years away, but at some point you’re going to dredge everything that you can get your hands on.” We can extend that time by reengineering some of the man-made inlets and jetties that block the sand’s flow, he said, but in the long run there’s an even bigger problem. “The ultimate source of supply is rivers. When you start talking decades out, the fact that all the rivers are dammed means that that supply of sand isn’t there anymore. But it could take a hundred years before you start noticing.

  “The demographics are such that people are moving to the coast. Infrastructure is being built on the coast,” Jenkins said. “Now, is that smart? Probably not. But we’re doing it.”

  We keep on building our castles of sand, heedless of the incoming tide.

  INTERLUDE

  7,500,000,000,000,000,000

  That’s the best estimate available as to how many grains of sand there are on the world’s beaches—7 quintillion, 500 quadrillion. Or 7.5 billion billion, if you prefer.

  That magnificent statistic comes courtesy of Howard McAllister, a researcher at the University of Hawaii. He came up with it by guesstimating the world’s beaches are covered an average of 30 meters deep by 5 meters wide with sand grains averaging 1 cubic millimeter in volume. He might be off by a quintillion or two, but who’s counting?

  CHAPTER 8

  Man-Made Lands

  Josef Kleindienst, tall, urbane, and self-assured in a cream-colored suit and cornflower-blue shirt, was pleased to welcome me to his own personal Germany. I followed him off his sleek little yacht and onto a beach marked with a wooden sign striped with the colors of the German flag. WILLKOMMEN IN DEUTSCHLAND, it read.

  At the time of this visit, in late 2015, it was difficult to perceive the Teutonic character of the place. First off, the weather was warm and sunny, though Christmas was just weeks away. Second, it’s an island. Actually, it’s not even a real island. It’s an enormous mass of sand dredged from the bottom of the Persian Gulf and piled up a couple of miles off the coast of Dubai, one of the seven micro-kingdoms that make up the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. A bunch of small olive and palm trees sat in pots near a little gazebo sheltering a few golf carts. Two workmen in yellow safety vests and helmets loitered around, while a third walked along the waterline looking for nonexistent trash. Other than that, Germany was just fourteen acres of flat, barren sand.

  But Kleindienst, an Austrian-born real estate developer, has a vision of something far grander. Kleindienst has spent tens of millions of dollars to make this pile of sand, and five others connected to it by little bridges, into a luxury resort simulacrum of his home continent that he believes will prove irresistible to legions of holidaymakers and vacation-home buyers from around the world. Each of the six islands is based on a different country or region—Germany, Monaco, Sweden, Switzerland, St. Petersburg, and “Main Europe.” Sweden will feature sauna-equipped private villas roofed with the inverted hulls of Viking ships. Monaco will host a “seven star” hotel and marina complex, featuring elements from the life of the late Princess Grace Kelly. The heart-shaped St. Petersburg will host classical ballet and opera performances. The vaguely defined island of “Main Europe” will be highlighted with a pseudo-Viennese city street with piped-in rain. In a final cherry of hubris on top of this titanic chutzpah sundae, Switzerland will feature a faux city street where real snow, blown from artfully concealed rooftop pipes, will drift down on strolling tourists.

  “On one side you will have snow every day, and other side, a tropical beach,” enthused Kleindienst in his Schwarzeneggerian accent. “We will create a space that is not existing anywhere.”

  Kleindienst took the wheel of one of the golf carts to show me around the naked little cays that will soon emerge as central Europe. “What we bought [in 2007] was just a pile of sand,” he said. In 2015, it still wasn’t much more than that. The only island with any action was Sweden, which is to be the most exclusive of Kleindienst’s islands (though why he believed a Nordic country that’s cold and dark half of the year will be a big draw in the Middle East wasn’t clear). A couple of dozen laborers and a small collection of bulldozers, front-end loaders, and trucks bustled around a handful of pocket-size construction sites. Mostly they were just deep holes, with puddles of seeped-in seawater on the bottom. They were to be sealed with concrete and made into foundations for the islands’ ten private villas. The 20,000-square-foot pleasure palaces will include seven bedrooms, a sauna, a “snow room,” a home theater, and a gym; for an extra fee you can also have the villa furnished by Bentley, the luxury car company. Asking price: about $13 million. The villas will come equipped with elevators, which is important because they will be five floors high, each with a private disco on top. “That might get a little loud,” I said. “We hope so! It’s a party place,” enthused Kleindienst.

  Ultimately, said Kleindienst, the whole project, dubbed the Heart of Europe, will encompass 4,000 housing units, twelve hotels (including the only one in the UAE where you can bring your dog), and dozens of restaurants. There are no roads to the islands, nor any on them; visitors will have to arrive by boat, helicopter, or seaplane.

  I lived in Las Vegas for a while, which made a lot of this seem familiar. Kleindienst’s project reminded me of one of my favorite of that city’s epically scaled theme hotel/casinos: the Venetian, with its indoor gondola canals and ersatz St. Mark’s Square.

  Kleindienst did not appreciate the comparison.

  “It’s not like the Venetian,” he said disdainfully. “They’re coming from a theme park angle. We are building a leisure destination with elements of different countries. Each restaurant will be staffed by people from that country, and they’ll behave like they do in their own country. We want to offer an authentic experience.” The place will even use the euro as currency instead of the UAE’s dirhams. Those trees now scattered around Germany’s landing dock are centuries-old olive trees imported from Spain; they’ll be deployed to give Monaco a genuinely Mediterranean feel. There will be street performers, artists, musicians, even a circus, all brought in from Europe.

  “Europe has fifty-one countries,” Kleindienst continued. “Every week we’ll have a festival from one. We’ll have a typical restaurant from every country, artists from every country. We want the Finnish restaurant to welcome people in Finnish. You should be able to experience Europe here in the Heart of Europe.”

  If you’ve got the money to travel to Dubai but you want to experience Europe, I wondered, wouldn’t you just, um, go to Europe? “Sure, you can go to the real country,” replied Kleindienst, who had clearly been asked this before. “But you can’t go to the beach in Finland year-round. Here you’ll have the chance to experience food fr
om fifty-one countries, festivals, street artists from fifty-one countries, everything in one place.” Not to mention underwater villas, fireworks shows, and snorkeling facilities.

  Kleindienst said he was aiming for a grand opening in 2020. He had already pushed back the finish date more than once, however. At the time of this writing, in late 2017, construction was still grinding forward.

  * * *

  —

  As Brobdingnagian as Kleindienst’s plans are, they are only a tiny part of a much, much bigger project. Kleindienst’s six island mini-nations make up just one neighborhood of the World: an archipelago of some three hundred artificial islands, roughly forming a map of, well, the world, built at the behest of the Emir of Dubai. Hundreds of millions of tons of sand were dredged from the Persian Gulf to form them in a paroxysm of speculation-driven geo-engineering in the mid-aughts. It is likely the biggest assemblage of artificial land ever created.1

  The idea was that developers and the global 1 percent would buy the islands and convert them into their own whimsical versions of the nations they represent. But when the global recession hit in 2008, the World came to a standstill. When I visited in 2015, almost every one of these hundreds of “islands” was still just a low, flat hummock of bare sand leopard-spotting the Persian Gulf’s surface, like blobs of cookie dough on a big blue tray.

  The whole project is, of course, ridiculous. But Dubai, once a tiny fishing village that is now home to the world’s tallest building, the world’s biggest shopping mall, and an indoor ski hill, has proven many times that just because something is ridiculous doesn’t mean it’s a bad business idea. And that definitely includes enormous, fancifully shaped artificial islands. Dubai is also home to the Palm Jumeirah, a man-made peninsula in the shape of a palm tree, a landmass so big you can see it from outer space. It hosts a gob-smacking panoply of luxury apartments, villas, and resorts where tens of thousands of people work, live, and play. In other words, where there was only water fifteen years ago, Dubai has created billions of dollars worth of real estate out of plain old sand.

  The Palm Jumeirah and the World are only the most ostentatious of many such “land reclamation” projects around the gulf and around the world. From the South China Sea to Tokyo Bay, from California to Nigeria, humans are putting unprecedented volumes of sand to one of its most consequential uses: the godlike power to create new land. We have disinterred vast armies of construction and silica sands from the ground and put them to work in ways that have transformed how we live; now we are also dredging enormous legions of marine sands from the ocean floor and using them to literally change the world, to alter the shape of countries and coastlines and create new land where there was no land before.

  Deployed in this way, marine sands are converted into valuable real estate. In some places, they are also made into a tool of geopolitics, a weapon with which nations assert themselves at the expense of their neighbors.

  * * *

  —

  Buy land,” Mark Twain once famously said. “They’re not making it any more.” Clever quip, but completely wrong. The Dutch have been building artificial land, much of it below sea level, since the eleventh century, damming wetlands and pumping them dry.2 Peter Stuyvesant, the first governor of what would later be called Manhattan, began expanding the island back in 1646, mostly with earth displaced by the construction of buildings and canals. Sand, however, is the material used most often to create new land. Sand dredged from underwater built long stretches of Chicago’s lakefront,3 as well as large portions of Marseilles, Hong Kong, and Mumbai. In the 1850s, developers filled shallow areas of San Francisco Bay with sand scraped from nearby hilltops to create what is now the city’s Financial District.4 Elsewhere in the United States, sand has been used to create artificial islands from scratch, including San Francisco’s Treasure Island, Southern California’s Balboa Island, and Seattle’s Harbor Island.

  But those efforts are puny compared to the gargantuan scale and audacity of modern land reclamation projects. What’s driving those efforts is a familiar force: the ever-swelling movement of people into cities.

  Because cities require trade to thrive, they tend to be sited on lakeshores, rivers, and especially seacoasts. Cities are attracting millions more people every year, and port cities are some of the most attractive: Eight of the world’s ten biggest cities are on the ocean. Fully half of the world’s population lives within sixty-two miles of a coastline.5 Those cities need space to house all those people, not to mention for the factories, ports, and other places where those people work. Many seaside megacities, from Tokyo to Lagos, are already densely packed, but are hemmed in by mountains, rivers, or deserts, making it tough to expand farther inland.

  Sand, it turns out, can not only make the concrete and glass for the buildings sheltering those people, but also the ground on which those buildings sit. Beginning in the1970s,6 advancing technology made it easier and cheaper to simply create more land. Bigger dredging ships equipped with extremely powerful pumps came on the market, capable of hauling up marine sand from ever greater depths and delivering it in ever greater quantities with ever greater accuracy onto predetermined places. As of 2017, the biggest dredge in operation was more than 700 feet long; stood on end, it would overtop a sixty-story apartment building. It carries a pipe that can pull up sand from 500 feet below the water’s surface.

  Land reclamation generally requires sand similar to that used in concrete: angular, interlocking, medium-sized quartz grains. According to the International Association of Dredging Companies, if good quality sand is available within a reasonable distance, new seafront land can be built for less than $536 per square meter—a fraction of the cost of buying existing seafront land in hot spots like Hong Kong, Singapore, or Dubai.7

  The new generation of dredging techniques was first applied on a major scale in the early 1970s to expand the Dutch port of Rotterdam into the North Sea. In 1975, Singapore followed up by building a new airport on top of 40 million cubic meters of sand pulled from the seabed. (Airports in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Qatar have also since been built on reclaimed land.)8 In the years that followed, land for industrial estates was created in Tokyo Bay with sand from over 240 feet below sea level. More deep suction dredging built up the coasts of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam. China, the fourth-largest nation on Earth in terms of naturally occurring land, has added hundreds of miles to its coast, and built entire islands to host luxury resorts.9 Lagos, Nigeria, is adding a 2,400-acre urban extension to its Atlantic shoreline. Smaller nations, including the Maldives, Malaysia, and Panama, have also built islands from scratch.

  Dubai’s neighbors have also decided they could use some more oceanfront. Qatar has built nearly 1,000 acres of land out of sand just off the coast of its capital, Doha. Bahrain has built up its harbor and a set of from-scratch resort islands out of dredged sand held in place with enormous tubes filled with more sand.

  And then there’s Singapore, a world leader in land reclamation. It is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, extremely rich but geographically tiny. To create more space for its nearly 6 million residents, the jam-packed city-state has built out its territory with an additional fifty square miles of land over the past forty years, almost all of it with sand imported from other countries. As I mentioned in chapter 1, the collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that neighboring Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted exports of sand to Singapore. Nonetheless, according to local media and outside organizations, sand still flows illegally from those places, especially Cambodia.10 Singapore has also cast its net farther afield. It now buys sand from Myanmar, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. The country is so anxious about supplies that it stockpiles a strategic reserve of sand for emergencies.11

  All told, according to a Dutch research group, human beings since 1985 have added 5,237 square miles of artificial land to the world’s coasts—an
area about as big as Connecticut or the nation of Jamaica.12 Much of it with sand.

  Even amid such competition, Dubai’s artificial islands take the prize for sheer brazenness. The International Association of Dredging Companies calls them “the most ambitious reclamation projects of all time in terms of size, concept, and engineering.”13

  That Dubai would create such vast, record-setting construction projects is all the more astonishing when you realize just how tiny and insignificant a place it was until very recently.

  Arab herders and desert-dwelling nomads have lived in this desolate corner of the Arabian Peninsula for millennia. The environment is so harsh that the population stayed stuck at around 80,000 from the advent of Islam in AD 630 until the 1930s.14 As former journalist Jim Krane writes in City of Gold: “Those who eked out a living [in what is now the UAE] were, until about fifty years ago, among the planet’s most undeveloped societies. No one envied their existence of perpetual hunger and thirst, nor their diet of dates and camel’s milk.”15

  One of the few permanent settlements was a tiny fishing village called Dubai that had grown up along an inlet from the Persian Gulf. Local tribes tussled over the meager glory of ruling the place until imperial Britain, concerned mainly with protecting its sea routes to India, began to assert itself in Arabia in the early 1800s. Dubai’s ruling sheikhs kept their positions and a measure of independence by cutting peace treaties with it. Great Britain never formally colonized the area, but dominated the sheikhdoms that would become the UAE for the next 150 years.

  In 1833, Dubai was overrun by tribespeople led by one Sheikh Maktoum bin Buti. The British soon recognized the Maktoums as Dubai’s rulers, a position the family has held ever since. Power has passed peacefully from one sheikh to the next for 175 years—by Middle Eastern standards, an extraordinary streak of stability.