Vince Beiser > Quotes

“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.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“That’s a fact the United States is learning the hard way. The most recent report on America’s infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s roads a grade of D. One-fifth of America’s highways and one-third of its urban roads are in “poor” condition, inflicting $112 billion worth of extra repair and operating costs on American drivers.25 According to the Federal Highway Administration, nearly one-quarter of all America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“we use twice as much concrete every year as steel, aluminum, plastic, and wood combined. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s population live in structures made at least partly out of concrete.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“speaking of climate change, concrete is making it worse.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“It’s a lucrative business. Eastman is a compact, middle-aged guy with a weather-beaten face adorned with a scrap of white beard and mustache. He tops it all off with a cowboy-hat-shaped hard hat. Eastman’s father was in the construction business, and Eastman and his three brothers grew up greasing the trucks. By his own account, Eastman barely graduated from high school. But he took a bunch of night courses to learn things like project estimating, and started his own contracting business in 1994. His company did all kinds of contracting work, including a little beach renourishment, until the real estate market crash in 2006. Eastman realized that he would do better to rely on the steady forces of erosion and the government funding earmarked to fight it than to tie his fortunes to the vicissitudes of the real estate market. “When the market dried up, we reinvented ourselves,” he says. Today Eastman Aggregate Enterprises does nothing but beach nourishment, all over Florida and in neighboring states. Eastman has five of his own trucks and forty-plus people working for him. His company hauls in about $15 million per year.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“In 1916, Fisher opened another continent-straddling road, the Dixie Highway, linking the Midwest to Florida. As intended, it brought more visitors to the state. Fort Lauderdale opened its first tourist hotel in 1919.26 Fisher was after a bigger prize, though. He set his sights farther south, buying up hundreds of acres of sand-fringed swampland near Miami. “Fisher’s Folly was a vermin-infested swamp on the ocean side of Biscayne Bay,” writes T. D. Allman in Finding Florida. “This boggy wilderness, he decided, was going to be to people with automobiles what Palm Beach was to those with private railroad cars.”27 Fisher tore up the mangroves, dredged millions of tons of sand and mud up from the bay, filled in his land until it was solid enough to be built on, and proclaimed it Miami Beach.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Hauling all those grains from the seafloor tears up the habitat of bottom-dwelling creatures and organisms.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Vaclav Smil estimates that worldwide, as much as 100 billion tons of poorly manufactured concrete—buildings, roads, bridges, dams, everything—may need to be replaced in the coming decades. That will take trillions of dollars, and billions of tons of new sand.30 “Almost all the concrete structures you see today are doomed to a limited life span,” writes Robert Courland. “Hardly any of the concrete structures that now exist are capable of enduring two centuries, and many will begin disintegrating after fifty years. In short, we have built a disposable world using a short-lived material, the manufacture of which generates millions of tons of greenhouse gases. Most of the concrete structures built at the beginning of the twentieth century have begun falling apart, and most will be, or already have been, demolished.”31 We have built our world out of sand in the form of concrete—and it is starting to crumble.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“According to Kenny, a program in Mexico that provided concrete floors for poor homes cut the rate of parasitic infestations by nearly 80 percent, and halved the number of children with diarrhea in any given month. Sand, it turns out, can not only provide shelter but can be a boon for public health.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“India is ground zero of the global sand crisis, the home of the blackest of the world’s black markets in the stuff.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“humans have been using up natural resources faster than nature can replenish them for forty years now”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“In almost every country on earth, the number of motor vehicles in use is increasing. There are at least 1.2 billion already on the move, and that number is projected to more than double by 2050.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Economic development as it has historically been understood requires concrete and glass. It requires”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“In 1957, there were only about 4,000 private swimming pools in the United States. By the next year, the number had shot to 200,000.62 It’s now more than 8 million.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“By 2016, total silica sand production stood at nearly 92 million tons per year, almost three-quarters of which was used for fracking.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Today, glass is so commonplace that most of us never even think about it—but we should, because it’s flat-out astonishing.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Economic development as it has historically been understood requires concrete and glass. It requires sand.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Dennis and Darlene aren’t greed-blinded corporate patsies. They’ve just looked at the evidence and their own situation and reached a different conclusion than Trinko or Schmitt. “So many studies have been done,” says Darlene. “They haven’t got one documented thing to show one person got silicosis from working in these mines.” (This is true, although as scientists are fond of saying, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.)”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Sand is now being used to build entire new lands, to pull oil from previously inaccessible pockets of the earth, and to create the digital devices that permeate our lives.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The quartz sands under the ground of western and central Wisconsin5 have just that rare combination. These are ancient grains that were eroded, transported, then buried and uplifted again. Generally speaking, the older a grain is, the more rounded it is, thanks to however many extra million years of having its angles and edges worn down. Wisconsin also happens to have an excellent rail network and relatively lax environmental regulations. And so the fracking boom has sparked a frac-sand boom in the Badger State. Thousands of acres of the state’s farmland and forest are being torn up to get at the precious silica below.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“sand mining is mining; it’s an extractive industry that inevitably affects the natural world.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“quartz sand is perhaps the most abundant substance on the planet’s surface. If we’re running out of that, we really need to rethink how we’re using everything.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Thanks to the fracking boom, which kicked into high gear in 2008, the United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s biggest oil and gas producer. None of this could happen without sand.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“It was no accident that one of the advertising slogans for Holiday Inn, a chain that found success by building hundreds of motels near freeways and interstates, was “Holiday Inn. The best surprise is no surprise.” In this way, freeways have helped to rob many places of their personalities, smothering regional character under a blanket of sand and gravel. The interstates are designed to be monotonous, engineered to the same standards, governed by the same speed limits, with signs in identical colors and fonts indicating the distance to the next city. As a result they induce highway hypnosis, providing an experience less like motoring than like sitting on a vast concrete conveyor belt, cruise-controlling along with no effort required beyond keeping one eye on the road and another on your gas gauge, for mile after mile after mile. That numbing sameness reduces the landscape to a blur interrupted at regular intervals by overbright outposts of gas stations and fast-food chains, replicated in slightly different configurations right across the entire country, so that you can have breakfast at a Denny’s in the morning in Nashville and dinner at what appears to”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“The next step is to melt down the polysilicon. But you can’t just throw this exquisitely refined material in a cook pot. If the molten silicon comes into contact with even the tiniest amount of the wrong substance, it causes a ruinous chemical reaction. You need crucibles made from the one substance that has both the strength to withstand the heat required to melt polysilicon, and a molecular composition that won’t infect it. That substance is pure quartz.12 This is where Spruce Pine quartz comes in. It’s the world’s primary source of the raw material needed to make the fused-quartz crucibles in which computer-chip-grade polysilicon is melted. A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high-purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry.13”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Bringing them up to current standards would cost tens of billions of dollars. Despite this, they don’t get a lot of attention from overstretched state inspectors. Nationwide, there’s only one safety inspector for every 205 dams. As of 2013, according to ASCE, South Carolina had only two people monitoring all of its 2,380 dams, and one of them was part-time.27 So it was as unsurprising as it was tragic when in 2015 heavy rain collapsed 36 of the state’s dams. As many as nineteen people were killed in the resultant flooding, according to The New York Times.28 Scores of other dams around the country have failed since 2010. All told, hundreds of Americans are killed or injured each year due to the failure of the nation’s sand-based roads, bridges, and dams.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Concrete is the skeleton of the modern world, the scaffold on which so much else is built.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Still, the beach itself continued to be viewed with suspicion. Seaside towns like the New Jersey Shore’s Atlantic City and the French Riviera’s Nice built boardwalks and piers so that visitors could enjoy the sights of the shore without having to actually set foot on its smelly, seaweed-strewn sands.”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“Glass can be effectively recycled (a New Zealand beer company has even developed a machine to convert bottles directly into beach-ready sand),”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

“(Among its many oddly colored beaches, Hawaii boasts a particularly rare one on the island of Kauai called Glass Beach. Much of its sand is made up of millions of colorful pieces of long-eroded glass.)”
― Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization