Not just gold: the six raw materials that have made world history

Too often we hear that we now live in an increasingly virtual and dematerialized reality. Conversely, it is still raw materials that move the world . But what exactly are raw materials? They are everything that Nature makes available and that human beings can use to satisfy the needs of their lives. They range from what we eat to minerals of all types that are used to build the objects we use every day. The economist Alessandro Giraudo rightly wrote: « Raw materials have influenced the entire human history. […] they caused wars, brought peace, stimulated expeditions into unknown lands, gave rise to incredible espionage operations, established new balances between countries and men ." In fact, raw materials have been one of the engines of human progress , since the times when our Paleolithic ancestors determined their movements based on the movements of the herds of large animals, their main food resource. And today without concrete, copper and fiber optics there would be no data processing centers, electricity or internet. But where does everything that surrounds us, that we eat, touch and use habitually come from? What are the fundamental raw materials and above all: where do they come from, who manages them, what impact does their procurement have on an energy and environmental level?

To find out more, here is "The Matter of the World " (Marsilio, 2023, pp. 448, also e-book) in which the English writer and popularizer Ed Conway puts the spotlight on the six materials on which our lives are based . Six "subjects" that for thousands of years have created empires, destroyed civilisations, fueled our ingenuity , recounting their vicissitudes with a critical spirit and mastery of dissemination, including technological innovations and climate change , economic ambitions and struggles for control of the most important deposits. These are sand , salt and iron which can be considered the skeleton that supports our world, copper which is its nervous system given that without this material we could not communicate over long distances, oil and lithium , raw materials which allow any type of movement by powering the motors in the first and forming the batteries in the second.

The charm of the book, which reads like an adventurous novel of discovery, lies in Conway's choice to "physically" follow the traces of silicon and lithium atoms in their journey around the Earth before becoming semiconductors and batteries.

Conway insinuates himself into the pipes of an oil refinery, into the furnaces where sand melts to become glass, and along the copper cables that carry electricity to every corner of the globe. From Mount Tenabo, in Nevada, to the east coast of England, from the Atacama desert, in Chile, to Mariupol, to the depths of the Atlantic, Conway visits factories, mines, cutting-edge industrial centers with safety measures to be implemented make the Pentagon pale. Traveling back and forth in time, he traverses the four great energy transitions of the modern era and imagines the fifth, driven by renewables .

It shows us, above all, the enormous environmental and energy costs that some processes, such as gold extraction carried out by devastating entire territories with poisonous substances, entail.

It therefore offers a new meaning, concrete and tangible, to the continuous calls to save, to reuse, to the need to avoid waste of all those raw materials which are precious not only and not so much because they are limited or rare, but because producing them involves energy, money, pollution, often the inhumane exploitation of workers.