The World in a Grain Read online

  For the most part, we don’t draft desert sands into our service. The grains found in deserts are mostly too round to use for construction. The reason is that wind is harsher than water. In a river, water cushions the impact of the grains tumbling against one another. In a desert, they just bang full force into one another, rounding off their corners and angles.19 Round objects don’t lock together as nicely as angular ones. It’s like the difference between trying to pile up a bunch of marbles as opposed to stacking up a bunch of blocks.

  We summon up these tiny soldiers in many different ways and in many places. In some places, multinational companies dredge sand from riverbeds or gouge it out of hillsides with massive machines. In others, local people haul it away with shovels and pickup trucks.

  Generally speaking, sand mining is a relatively low-tech industry. The basic machinery involved hasn’t changed much since the 1920s. Sand from the beds of rivers and lakes is dredged up with suction pumps, or clamshell claws mounted on floating platforms, or ships equipped with scoops set on conveyor belts. Underwater sands are easier to mine, since there’s no intervening earth, known as overburden, to scrape away. They also come largely cleansed of dust-sized particles. On land, sand is usually quarried from open pits. Sometimes that requires using explosives and crushing machines to break apart sandstone, rock made of sand that has been glued together over the millennia by naturally occurring cements. Regardless of its source, the raw sand needs to be washed and run through a series of screens to sort it by size.

  Because sand is so common, there are sand mines all over the place, in almost every country. There is no one key source, no Saudi Arabia of sand. Much of the extraction of sand is carried out by relatively small regional companies. In the United States, some 4,100 companies and government agencies harvest aggregate from about 6,300 locations in all fifty states.20 The breakdown is similar in Western Europe.21

  Though it’s often carried out on a small, seemingly insignificant scale, there’s no escaping the fact that sand mining is mining; it’s an extractive industry that inevitably affects the natural world. All those thousands of small mines, together with many larger ones, add up to a colossal impact. Sand mining tears up wildlife habitat, fouls rivers, and destroys farmland. The damage can be mitigated. Some companies are more conscientious than others, some extraction methods are more disruptive than others, and some governments are more vigilant than others. But everywhere, the process of pulling sand from the earth causes at best a little damage, and at worst, catastrophe.

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  Perhaps the only place where most people really appreciate sand—or even think about it—is the beach. Those beloved strips of sun-kissed shore are on the front lines of the global battle for sand, and they are taking heavy fire.

  The beach near the tiny town of Marina, California, a couple of hours south of San Francisco, is a broad stretch of wild, undeveloped sand sloping into the foaming waves of the Pacific Ocean. Much of its miles-long expanse is designated as a state park. Hidden away behind high dunes bedecked with green and orange succulents, it’s a postcard-perfect slice of natural beauty. And it is gradually disappearing.

  “This is the fastest-eroding shoreline in California,” said Ed Thornton, a retired coastal engineer and former professor with the Naval Postgraduate School in nearby Monterey, to a crowd of protesters gathered on the beach in early 2017. “We’re losing eight acres a year of pristine shore, some of the most beautiful in the world. It’s because of sand mining.”

  The demonstration was being held near a hulking dredge operated by Cemex, a global construction firm based in Mexico. At the time, this machine was sucking up an estimated 270,000 cubic meters of sand from a tide-filled lagoon every year. The grains were to be bagged and sold to contractors across the country for sand blasting22 and lining oil and gas wells.

  For most of the twentieth century there were many such ocean sand mines along the California coast. But in the late 1980s the federal government shut them down because it had become clear the loss of sand was severely eroding the Golden State’s famous beaches. the Cemex operation, however, kept running thanks to a legal loophole: the dredging area appeared to sit above the mean high tide line, putting it out of federal jurisdiction. Activists and local legislators fought for years to shut the mine down. A few months after that demonstration on the beach, they finally won: Cemex agreed to phase out the dredging by late 2020.

  That still leaves at least one sand mine in operation that may be damaging California’s coastal areas, however. Environmentalists are battling in court to stop sand dredging in San Francisco Bay, saying it is causing the erosion of a nearby ocean beach and endangering bird habitat.23

  In other parts of the world, the impact of sand miners on beaches is more clear-cut. They’re actively stealing them. Thieves in Jamaica made off with 1,300 feet of white sand from one of the island’s finest beaches in 2008. Smaller-scale beach-sand looting is ongoing in Morocco, Algeria, Russia, and many other places around the world. In Florida, southern France, and many other vacation hot spots, beaches are shrinking thanks to other forms of human interference, as we’ll see in chapter 7.

  The damage being done to beaches is only one facet, and not even the most dangerous one, of the damage being done by sand mining around the world.

  Sand miners have completely obliterated at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. Hauled off boatload by boatload, the sediment forming those islands ended up mostly in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts of sand to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The city-state has created an extra fifty square miles in the past forty years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer. The demand has denuded beaches and riverbeds in neighboring countries to such an extent that Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted or completely banned exports of sand to Singapore.

  The sand underneath the water isn’t safe, either. Sand miners are increasingly turning to the seafloor,24 vacuuming up millions of tons with dredges the size of aircraft carriers. One-third of all aggregate used in construction in London and southern England comes from beneath25 the United Kingdom’s offshore waters. Japan relies on sea sand even more heavily, pulling up around 40 million cubic meters from the ocean floor each year.26 That’s enough to fill up the Houston Astrodome thirty-three times.

  Hauling all those grains from the seafloor tears up the habitat of bottom-dwelling creatures and organisms. The churned-up sediment clouds the water, suffocating fish and blocking the sunlight that sustains underwater vegetation.27 The dredging ships dump grains too small to be useful, creating further waterborne dust plumes that can affect aquatic life far from the original site.28

  Dredging of ocean sand has also damaged coral reefs in Florida and many other places, and threatens important mangrove forests, sea grass beds, and endangered species such as freshwater dolphins29 and the Royal Turtle.30 One round of dredging may not be significant, but the cumulative effect of several can be. Large-scale ocean sand mining is new enough that there hasn’t been a lot of research on it, meaning that no one knows for sure what the long-term environmental impacts will be. We’re sure to find out in the coming years, however, given how fast the practice is expanding.

  Sand mining is also damaging lands and livelihoods far from any coast. The fracking boom in the United States has created a voracious hunger for what’s known as “frac sand.” Fracking is the deeply controversial method of extracting oil and gas from shale rock formations by breaking—that is, fracturing—the subterranean stone by blasting it with a high-pressure mix of water, chemicals, and a particular type of especially hard, rounded sand grains. It happens that there are huge deposits of just that kind of sand in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Result: the fracking rush in North Dakota has sparked a frac sand rush in the Upper Midwest. Thousands of acres of fields and forests have been
stripped away so that miners can get their hands on those rare grains.

  Colossal amounts of more ordinary construction sand is dredged up from riverbeds or dug from nearby floodplains. In central California, floodplain sand mining has diverted river waters into dead-end detours and deep pits that have proven fatal traps for salmon.31 In northern Australia, floodplains that are home to the world’s biggest collection of rare carnivorous plants are being wiped out by sand mining.32

  Dredging sand from riverbeds, as from seabeds, can destroy habitat and muddy waters to a lethal degree for anything living in the water. Kenyan officials shut down all river sand mines in one western province in 2013 because of the environmental damage they were causing. In Sri Lanka,33 sand extraction has left some riverbeds so deeply lowered that seawater intrudes into them, damaging drinking water supplies. India’s Supreme Court warned in 2011 that “the alarming rate of unrestricted sand mining” was disrupting riparian ecosystems all over the country, with fatal consequences for fish and other aquatic organisms and “disaster” for many bird species.34

  In Vietnam, researchers with the World Wildlife Federation believe sand mining on the Mekong River is a key reason the 15,000-square-mile Mekong Delta—home to 20 million people and source of half of all the country’s food and much of the rice that feeds the rest of Southeast Asia—is gradually disappearing. The ocean is overtaking the equivalent of one and a half football fields of this crucial region’s land every day. Already, thousands of acres of rice farms have been lost, and at least 1,200 families have had to be relocated from their coastal homes. All this is caused partly by climate-change-induced sea level rise, and partly by direct human intervention. For centuries, the delta has been replenished by sediment carried down from the mountains of Central Asia by the Mekong River. But in recent years, in each of the several countries along its course, miners have begun pulling huge quantities of sand from the riverbed to use for the construction of Southeast Asia’s surging cities. Nearly 50 million tons of sand are being extracted annually—enough to cover the city of Denver two inches deep. “The sediment flow has been halved,” says Marc Goichot, a researcher with the World Wildlife Fund’s Greater Mekong Programme. That means that while natural erosion of the delta continues, its natural replenishment does not. At this rate, nearly half the delta will be wiped out by the end of this century.

  Sand extraction from rivers has also caused untold millions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure around the world. The stirred-up sediment clogs up water supply equipment, and all the earth removed from riverbanks leaves the foundations of bridges exposed and unsupported. A 1998 study found that each ton of aggregate mined from the San Benito River on California’s central coast caused $11 million in infrastructure damage—costs that are borne by taxpayers.35 In many countries, sand miners have dug up so much ground that they have dangerously exposed the foundations of bridges and hillside buildings, putting them at risk of collapse.

  That risk isn’t just theoretical. In Taiwan in 2000, a bridge undermined by sand extraction gave way. The following year, the same thing happened to a bridge in Portugal just as a bus was passing over it; seventy people were killed.36 Another bridge collapse in India in 2016 that killed twenty-six may have been caused by sand mining.

  Sand mining can also directly harm people and their communities. Unprotected miners have died when sandpit walls collapsed on them. Fisherfolk from Cambodia to Sierra Leone are losing their livelihoods as sand mining decimates the populations of fish and other aquatic creatures they rely on. In some places, mining has made riverbanks collapse, taking out agricultural land and causing floods that have displaced whole families. In Vietnam in 2017 alone, so much soil slid into heavily mined rivers, taking with it the crops and homes of hundreds of families, that the government shut down sand extraction completely in two provinces. And in Houston, Texas, government officials say that sand mining in the nearby San Jacinto River—much of it illegal—seriously exacerbated flooding damage during 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. It seems that sand miners stripped away so much vegetation along the river banks that huge amounts of silt were left exposed, and were then washed into the river by Harvey’s rains. That silt then piled up in riparian bottlenecks and at the bottom of Lake Houston, the city’s principal source of drinking water, causing them to overflow into nearby neighborhoods.

  River-bottom sand also plays an important role in local water supplies. It acts like a sponge, catching the water as it flows past and percolating it down into underground aquifers. But when that sand has been stripped away, instead of being drawn underground, the water just keeps on moving to the sea, leaving aquifers to shrink. As result, there are parts of Italy and southern India where river sand mining has drastically depleted local drinking water supplies.37 Elsewhere, the lack of water is killing crops. Researchers fear that sand mining in the Chaobai River, which feeds one of the main reservoirs supplying Beijing, may not only disrupt the river’s ecosystem but also compromise the quality of the capital’s drinking38 water.

  Even after the sand miners are done, the battered landscape they leave behind can be startlingly dangerous. In the United States and elsewhere, mining companies are generally required to restore the land to a certain extent after they are finished. But in less well-organized countries, miners leave behind deep open pits that fill with rainwater and trash, degenerating into swampy breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes. A number of children have reportedly drowned in such pits in recent years. In Sri Lanka and India, sand mining has destroyed crocodile habitats, sending the beasts closer to river shores, where they have killed at least half a dozen39 people in the last ten years.

  In response to all this destruction, governments around the world have tried, with varying levels of commitment, to regulate sand mining and to restrict the places and manner in which it is done. That in turn has spawned a booming worldwide black market in sand.

  Illegal sand mining runs a wide gamut. At one end, it includes legitimate businesses overstepping the boundaries of their permits. In 2003, for instance, California filed a lawsuit40 against Hanson Aggregates, a global mining outfit, for unauthorized dredging of sand from the San Francisco Bay. “These sand pirates have enriched themselves by stealing from the state and ripping off taxpayers,” the state’s attorney general declared at the time. Hanson eventually settled, paying the state $42 million.

  At the other extreme are outright criminals, from petty thieves to well-organized gangs willing to kill to protect their sand business. In 2015, New York state authorities slapped a $700,000 fine on a Long Island contractor who had illegally gouged thousands of tons of sand from a 4.5-acre patch of land near the town of Holtsville and then refilled the pit with toxic waste. These “scoop and fill” operations have become common as the area’s legitimate sources of sand have been increasingly depleted, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.41

  In other countries, the black market takes more dramatic forms. One of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, a man allegedly involved in a spate of recent car bombings, got his start stealing sand from public beaches. In Morocco, fully half the sand used for construction is estimated to be mined illegally; whole stretches of beach in that country are disappearing.42 In Kenya illegal sand miners reportedly coax children into dropping out of school to come work for them. South Africa has set up a dedicated squad of police dubbed the Green Scorpions to combat illegal sand mining. Sometimes the criminal sand trade crosses borders. Dozens of Malaysian officials were charged in 2010 with accepting bribes and sexual favors in exchange for allowing illegally mined sand to be smuggled into Singapore.

  Like any big-money black market, sand also generates violence. People have been shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured, and imprisoned over sand mining in countries around the world—some for trying to stop the environmental damage, some in battles over control of the land, and some caught in the cross fire. In Cambodia, police have jail
ed environmental activists who boarded river dredges to protest against illegal mining. In Ghana, security forces have opened fire on rowdy demonstrations against local sand miners. In China, a dozen members of a sand mining gang were sent to prison in 2015 after battling with knives in front of a police station. In Indonesia in 2016, an activist was beaten into a coma, and another tortured and stabbed to death, by the sand miners they were trying to stop. In Kenya, at least nine people have been killed—including a policeman hacked to death with machetes—in battles between farmers and sand miners in recent years.

  To understand how the demand for sand can get so intense, and how it can spawn such destruction, in 2015 I started looking into the illegal sand trade in India. India is ground zero of the global sand crisis, the home of the blackest of the world’s black markets in the stuff. The Times of India43 estimates that the illicit sand trade is worth some $2.3 billion a year. Battles among and against “sand mafias” there have reportedly killed hundreds of people in recent years—including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people who get in their way. I had an unexpected and somewhat stressful encounter with some of these mafiosi not long ago, while I was investigating a murder so brazen it was hard to believe it had happened.

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  A little after eleven A.M. on July 31, 2013, the sun was beating down on the low, modest residential buildings lining a back street in the Indian farming village of Raipur Khadar, southeast of New Delhi. Faint smells of cooking spices, dust, and sewage seasoned the air.44

  In the back room of a two-story brick-and-plaster house, Paleram Chauhan, a fifty-two-year-old vegetable farmer, was napping after an early lunch. In the next room, his wife and daughter-in-law were cleaning up while Paleram’s son Ravindra played with his three-year-old nephew.