Material World
A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
Ed Conway
Having read it
★★★☆☆
A rather good example of how a book should not be written, in one’s humble opinion – aside from the few interesting facts sprinkled throughout its somewhat plodding yet enthusiastic attempts to highlight the many unseen but essential connections enabling society to function and progress – which was skimmed quite a bit, even skipped a few times.
It also seemed a bit full of itself and its efforts in research, data, details even narrative and could have done with some serious editing to cut (the needless waffle and) the whole book down by a hundred pages or so.
Still, apart from the introduction being too long the conclusion was a reasonable summary of the Material World and our future.
Not sure it was worth anywhere near the six-week-or-so wait from reserving it (at the library) to getting to borrow it, given its previous reader went and renewed it (they must have ploughed through it all and been taking notes or something!) but anyway, it was cheaper than buying a copy so thank you public libraries for the access to book services you provide!
A good passage
We are heading, in short, for a bumpy few years. For decades we have convinced ourselves that the main constraint facing humanity is the scope of our imagination. We created an economic system so sophisticated and seamless that it allowed us to forget about the materials upon which it was built. But in attempting to build our way to net zero, we are confronting the inescapable limitations of thermodynamics and material constraints.
There is a crucial distinction here, however. This time around we are building our way into the future. For centuries, humankind exploited energy commodities from the ground in order to burn them. Coal, oil and gas were extracted and then incinerated, releasing carbon along the way. This time, we are mining and refining lithium to seal into batteries that we can reuse and recycle. This step shift will not prevent us digging and blasting more than ever before; it will not prevent us using fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. But it might, just might, mean this time really is different.
A second good passage
As someone who has worked my entire life in the ethereal world, enjoying the spoils of the Material World without ever getting my hands dirty, the journey recounted in this book has been somewhat chastening. The more I travelled, the greater the nagging feeling that we have all become disconnected from the primary industries upon which we all rely for our survival. Perhaps this is simply the quid pro quo of modern capitalism. You can get anything you want from anywhere in the world for a bargain price, but don’t whatever you do expect to understand how it was made or how it got to you. Perhaps it hardly matters that there is no single person in the world who understands how to make a pencil, or a silicon chip. But what if this disconnection is fuelling the alienation so many people feel towards capitalism? Perhaps that helps explain why some people in the developed world are turning away from mass production and embracing artisanal products, or even attempting to manufacture their own homespun items rather than ordering them online. It all speaks of a desire to reconnect with the basics of the Material World.