Ariana

“In the Cheshire town of Northwich, not far from where the brine comes out of the ground, you will find another part of this salt diaspora, an old ICI site run these days by Tata Chemicals, which also owns British Salt. That the Cheshire salt which once provided Gandhi with the cause for his iconic satyagraha is now being produced by an Indian company is one of those ironies little appreciated outside the Material World.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“What makes this all the more discomforting is not merely the bad stuff—the carbon emissions whose consequences we are finally starting to understand, the particulate pollution in our cities and the plastic waste in our seas—but the good stuff too. It is the billions of lives lived thanks to oil and gas. It is the fact that oil and gas are so useful as well as so destructive.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization