Material World takes us through history and across the world, tracing the journey of raw resources through intricate processes to create the products that make up our world. It is an entertaining journey, enlightening, surprising, and too often distressing. You may think that reading about sand or iron would be dull, but you would be wrong. Conway visits the sources of the materials, incorporates annedocts from human history, explains their social, industrial, and environmental impact, and projects what the future will look as we struggle to keep up with demand.

Sand gives us glass, cement, and silicon.

Salt is necessary to human health but also is essential to the fertilizer, chemical, and pharmaceutical industry.

Iron is needed for steel used in our machines and buildings.

Copper gave us the circuitry to light and power our world.

Oil and gas fuels our vehicles and heats our homes, is the source of plastics, and powers hydroponic agriculture.

And lithium, “white gold,” goes into the batteries that store energy.

The modern world requires all of these materials. And nothing is made without oil. Conway doubts that we can arrive at net zero without a new energy source and he considers the emerging technologies.

These materials are sourced in one country, processed in another, an manufactured into goods in another. It is a fragile web, and a breakdown in geopolitics would threaten the supply chain.

As civilization requires batteries to store power, demand will outpace the ability to mine lithium; recycling to reclaim raw materials will become all important.

Conway believes we need to understand the chain that brings us the wonders of modern technology and life. He leaves us with hope that technology will evolve to a more efficient and sustainable energy source. “These six substances helped us survive and thrive. They helped us make magic. They can do it again,” he ends.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )

Spend some time with this book and have your eyes opened to some of the miraculous substances that undergird modern civilization as it is enjoyed in the West. To give just one example, I will never look at sand in the same way again now knowing that it makes the glass for our digital devices and optic fibres. Conway is right to step back and take a clear and awestruck look at the materials that make up our world.

This is a thoroughly researched, in depth look at the substances which make modern life possible. It's full of on-site descriptions of places the public can't go which turn the raw stuff of the earth into the products we buy. It's a little staggering how much of what we rely on day to day depends on just a few minerals coming out of the ground.

I learned of this book many months ago from the Financial Times and have been anticipating the US release.

This is a book about the fundamental feedstocks of modern (and often ancient) civilization. You might be wondering—what are the six most important materials? Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium.

Some might consider this book long, but I wish it was ten times longer! Conway could have written a book-length treatment on each of these materials and I would still have read every page. As it is, the book feels rather scattershot, as there isn't possible enough space to give even a basic overview of the history and import of each of these materials. That said, Conway does a decent job given the limited word count he has to work with.

Although Conway doesn't explicitly speak about animism, his enchantment with and treatment of the six materials he covers shows the supreme regard in which he holds these substances. And you can't dig into the properties, histories, and attributes of these materials without beginning to hold them in a certain esteem and develop a certain rapport. I wish this book did get more deeply into an animist treatment of these materials, but there is still plenty of magic to go around regardless.

There are so many fascinating tidbits in the book:
- Germany and Great Britain did a rubber-for-glass swap at the height of World War I
- There is a single mine in North Carolina that is the only supply of the quartz crucibles required to make the silicon wafers required for computer chips. If it was disrupted, global production of chips would halt within six months.
- Rio Tinto mined out (and destroyed) the caves which have housed the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (Aboriginal nations) for the past 46,000 years ("human rights violation" doesn't begin to relate the magnitude of the violation)
- If you want steel that isn't radioactive, you need to source it from metal produced before the advent of the atomic bomb.
- Salt was the first regionally traded good, and is the reason for the creation of the earliest of roads.

"Planet of the Humans," the documentary produced by Michael Moore in 2020, received a lot of flack for being too pessimistic about the outlook for the green transition. Even if the emphasis and some of the citations in that documentary are off, the general thesis was that—the only realistic green transition would require roughly a 100x reduction in our resource and energy use. This is the subtext of Conway's book as well. Conway points out that lithium recovery rates when recycled are only 50%, which, once you start drawing up the numbers across a few dozen cycles, is not much better than zero. He also points out that the creation of a wind farm producing a comparable amount of energy to a natural gas plant requires many more times materials (and currently, we can't recycle the materials in a wind turbine, even though they wear out). We're mined one third of theoretical terrestrial copper reserves (although there is more in the deep sea), and we're already down to about 0.5% yield—those other 2/3rds will only get worse. And the story is the same for so many other resources. Conway talks about how we've been through four energy revolutions—each time moving to a source with higher energy density. If the green revolution comes about, it will be the first time of decreasing energy density.

To come back to animism—maybe this is the only method which enables humans to have the proper reverence for the materials upon which we rely. Want a green revolution? Get animist.

If you're looking to learn more about the building blocks of our world, this is your book. ( )

La materia del mondo. Una storia della civiltà in sei elementi di Ed Conway è un libro di divulgazione scientifica che racconta la storia della civiltà attraverso sei elementi fondamentali: ferro, rame, petrolio, silicio, litio e carbonio.

Il libro è scritto in modo chiaro e scorrevole, e offre una visione globale e interdisciplinare del ruolo che questi elementi hanno avuto nello sviluppo della nostra società. Conway, giornalista scientifico del canale televisivo britannico Sky News, si avvale di una vasta documentazione per raccontare le storie affascinanti di questi materiali, dalle loro origini geologiche alla loro scoperta e utilizzo da parte dell'uomo.

Il libro si apre con una panoramica delle quattro grandi transizioni energetiche che hanno caratterizzato l'epoca moderna: la prima, basata sulla combustione della legna, la seconda, basata sul carbone, la terza, basata sul petrolio, e la quarta, basata sulle fonti rinnovabili. Conway esplora poi le storie dei sei elementi, uno per uno.

Il ferro, ad esempio, è stato fondamentale per lo sviluppo dell'agricoltura, della metallurgia e della navigazione. Il rame, invece, è stato utilizzato per la produzione di utensili, armi e monete. Il petrolio, infine, è la fonte di energia più importante del mondo moderno, e ha alimentato la rivoluzione industriale e il consumismo.

Conway non si limita a raccontare la storia di questi elementi, ma affronta anche le sfide e le opportunità che essi pongono al nostro futuro. Il libro si conclude con una riflessione sul ruolo che la materia e l'energia avranno nel mondo del futuro, caratterizzato dai cambiamenti climatici e dalla transizione energetica.

La materia del mondo è un libro importante e stimolante, che offre una visione globale e interdisciplinare della storia della civiltà. È un libro che dovrebbe essere letto da chiunque sia interessato a comprendere il mondo che ci circonda.

Scrittura chiara e scorrevole
Visione globale e interdisciplinare
Documentazione accurata
Storie affascinanti
Punti deboli:Talvolta un po' prolisso ( )