Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

Written by Ed Conway

Narrated by Ed Conway

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780593788264

Ed Conway

Ed Conway is the economics editor of Sky News. Previously he was the economics editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. His appointment to this role, when only twenty-five, made him the youngest ever economics editor of a British national newspaper. He lives in London.

[hccpsk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A finely written and meticulously researched look at six substances — sand, salt, copper, iron, oil, and lithium — Ed Conway’s The Material World explores the history and science behind these elements that shape basically everything. At times a little long, but mostly Conway keeps things moving with a sharp mix of personal narrative that helps the reader stay connected. I listened to the audio that Conway reads himself, and I was continuously reminded of Ed Yong’s An Immense World with splashes of humor, wit, and the easy way of describing very scientific things without too much science.

[pstrombo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very fascinating look at the current and historical impact on civilization by very common elements. Well worth reading.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[lcl999 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A top book. The complexity and magnitude behind the mining, distribution, conversion, and use of the six materials is far greater than I had imagined. Hard to add to the praise from the other reviews.
I'm waiting for a book on the second tier of materials. Perhaps wood, aluminium, uranium, gold, water, air

[willszal-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.