Asphalt and Sand: A Material History of Extraction and Consumption
Vince Beiser | The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization | Riverhead Books | 2018 | 304 Pages
Kenneth O’Reilly | Asphalt: A History | University of Nebraska Press | 2021 | 344 Pages
I’m writing this in a plane flying south over California, from San Francisco, where I grew up, to Santa Barbara, where I attend grad school. It’s a cloudy day, but in between the wisps one glimpses the landscape: dramatic mountain ranges, the ocean, then as the plane banks inland the vast fields of the Central Valley, the towns that spread in orderly rectangles and semicircles of developer cul-de-sacs or in thin strips along state roads. Over and over, though, these landscapes are interrupted by bare brown scrapes, a piece of hillside carved away or perhaps a pit with stagnant water reflecting up from the center. They’re mines and they’re everywhere, even in a state better known for the more glamorous industries centered in Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
The stuff we use all the time comes from somewhere, and if it’s not grown as a plant or produced in a lab, it’s extracted from the ground. As consumption increases along with the global population, we need more and more mines. What is extracted has to be transported to a facility where it can be refined, purified, or otherwise made useful, and then from there to the stores or gas stations where it can be sold to us, the consumers. Each of these steps requires energy, usually provided by fossil fuels which were, themselves, extracted.
Perhaps growing discomfort with the structure of extraction and consumption that underlies our world, coupled with our utter inability to escape it, has fueled the recent boom in material history texts. Since 2010, these range from Robert Courland’s Concrete Planet and Joachim Radkau’s Wood: A History to James Campbell and Will Pryce’s Brick: A History and Jonathan Robins’s Oil Palm: A Global History. In 2020, Kenneth O’Reilly’s Asphalt took on a material that is both extracted and literally supports the transportation that gets things, and us, from place to place.
As O’Reilly describes, asphalt occurs naturally, much of it in seafloor “volcanoes.” 85% of natural asphalt is found in the Western hemisphere; the most famous asphalt field is probably the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, but the largest reserves are in Alberta, which hold an estimated 2.2 trillion barrels. In addition to the natural reserves, asphalt has, for the last 100 years, primarily been produced by refining crude oil residue. Asphalt’s most common use is as the binder in blacktop; aggregate makes up the remaining 95% of the dark mix we see on roads and highways. (In lighter-colored concrete, the other main type of paving, Portland cement replaces asphalt as the binder.) Asphalt is also used in roof shingles, to line reservoirs and other waterproof containers, and is now being used to produce synthetic crude oil.
After explaining what asphalt is, O’Reilly turns to its social and political history. The largest antique source of asphalt was the Dead Sea, where chunks of seafloor asphalt periodically broke off and rose to the surface. In ancient Egypt, this asphalt was used to waterproof boats and mummies, as well as roads, canals, and roofs, and it was prized enough that Alexander the Great’s general Antigonus started—and lost—a war with the Nabataean Arabs over the Dead Sea’s asphalt. In medieval Europe, asphalt’s uses in construction were forgotten and it was mainly important for its symbolic or supposedly healthful properties. It was often extracted from mummified bodies. Medieval asphalt was contradictory, both used for medicinal purposes and symbolizing hell and damnation.
The second part of the book, “Coming to America,” is about the United States and its use of asphalt. At the same time, it tells of “asphalt’s transition from its primary historical purpose as a general waterproofing and binding material to the more focused waterproofing and binding purpose of making road surfaces relatively impermeable.” Asphalt was rare in road construction until it hit the big time in 1867 with the asphalting of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Soon Washington was an “asphalt city,” and the quiet, smooth streets inspired other cities to follow suit. Paving became ever more important with the popular rise of bicycles and then cars. At the turn of the century, refined asphalt was developed and largely supplanted natural asphalt due to its higher quality and volume. This was also the time when concrete emerged as a road paving material, and a competition between concrete and asphalt emerged that continues to this day.
O’Reilly closely associates war and asphalt. In World War II, asphalt served many purposes. From the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to Tinian in the Northern Marianas, Navy construction battalions used asphalt to construct airfields and roads on short notice. Over 17,000 tons of asphalt were brought ashore during the Normandy landings. In Nazi Germany, a number of concentration camps forced prisoners to work in the production of asphalt, whether in asphalt mines or an asphalt plant at Maly Trostinec. During the Vietnam War, building asphalt runways was fundamental to the American policy of aerial bombardment. Asphalt has continued to be the material of choice for ad-hoc roads and runways built during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Throughout this time, O’Reilly argues, asphalt was also a tool of racism and segregation. For instance, many of the Interstate Highways that split Black communities were paved in asphalt. More broadly, he argues that, in tandem with car culture, asphalt facilitated residential segregation. O’Reilly also cites the violence toward Black Americans that occurs on streets, from traffic stops to the beating of Rodney King and the murder of George Floyd as key examples of points where the spheres of asphalt and racism intersect in American history.
The best part of the book describes asphalt’s present-day role in what O’Reilly calls “the oil-sand century.” Much asphalt is produced from oil sands, primarily in Alberta, which Business Insider called “the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet.” Oil sands either have to be mined in open pits or blasted with steam. To make them moveable, they are mixed with water that is then contaminated and stored in huge networks of tailing ponds. To get to refineries, oil sands are moved through leak-prone pipelines like the scrapped Keystone XL. Each step of asphalt’s production has environmental consequences that extend beyond their location of occurrence.
Despite its fascinating episodes, Asphalt has three frustrating flaws: a proclivity for tangents; a disregard for non-Western societies, except in the context of American military aggression; and a focus on roads, which can be asphalt or concrete, rather than on innovations in the use of the actual material. For instance, the harm that interstate highways did to Black communities is undisputed, but many highways are paved with concrete and no asphalt at all, calling into question the relevance of this story to a history of asphalt. Most importantly, the book leaves readers unclear about what the stakes would be if we ran out of asphalt tomorrow. Couldn't we just replace it with concrete?
Not so with sand. Vince Beiser’s 2018 material history The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization makes clear just how much we rely on these tiny grains: sand is in every building, every computer, and every piece of glass. At the same time, sand is being used to replenish or augment beaches and waterfronts around the world. We use sand constantly, and we’re running out.
Beiser’s book is journalistic, not scholarly, and in this instance his approach is more effective than O’Reilly’s. Beiser starts with the investigation of an anti-sand mining activist’s murder in India, and describes the various ways in which sand is mined: in open pits aboveground, or via suction clamps, clamshell claws, or scoops underwater. Many sand mines are small-scale and illegal, like the ones in Raipur Khadar, near New Delhi, where activist Paleram Chauhan was murdered in 2013. Others, of course, are legal and huge.
From this dramatic opening, The World in a Grain is divided into three sections. The first zooms out to cover the development of Portland cement and the use of concrete starting in the 19th century. It describes the technological and economic innovations that have made concrete the worldwide material of choice for buildings and for many roads (vying, of course, with asphalt). The second section looks at sand’s use in glass, silicon chips, and fracking. The third explores the role of unprocessed sand: to literally shore up receding coastlines, to create new land like the Palm Jumeirah luxury islands in Dubai, and, as an enemy, in the fight against desertification in Inner Mongolia. The book’s conclusion, “Beyond Sand,” is a warning. Almost any consumption requires the use of sand, whether it takes the form of concrete and glass buildings, roads, fracked oil, or silicon chips. And despite initiatives to develop concrete out of recycled plastic and pavement from steel waste and coffee grounds, in the end, as Beiser writes, “human beings have to start using less sand. For that matter, we have to use less of everything.”
This call is more depressing than heartening, as the call to reduce consumption seems just as unlikely to go heeded as agreements to reduce carbon emissions. But Beiser has shown how sand illustrates that we cannot go on using as much stuff as we do. He has convinced us that we really need to care about sand, which O’Reilly never quite manages for his subject material in Asphalt. If the last decade is anything to go by, there will soon be many more material historians who can learn from these examples, and hopefully more readers who can heed their urgent lessons.