Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental
materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our
ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern
world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our
future.
The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins
of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that
power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a
weightless world of information--what Ed Conway calls "the ethereal
world"--our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the
material.
In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human
history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons
of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in
Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents,
cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on
Earth--traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in
Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green
pools where lithium originates.
Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks,
the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to
turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human
civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.
