Citations & References:"A man riding a bike and carrying two sacks on his shoulders, was stopped by a guard while crossing the border.'What do you have in those bags?' asked the guard.'Sand,' the cyclist replied.'You’ll need to open them so I can take a look inside.'The guard emptied the bags and found out they did indeed contain nothing but sand. The man put his bags back on his shoulders and continued across the border.This happened a couple of times each week for a month.Sometime later, that same guard ran into the cyclist in the city.'Hey, where have you been?' the guard asked. 'You sure had me wondering. I know you were smuggling something across the border. If you tell me what it was, I won’t prosecute you. What was it?'The man smiled and said, 'Bicycles!'""In the twenty-first century," the Moon moved on, "sand has become more important than ever, and in more ways than ever. This is the digital age, in which the jobs we work at, the entertainment we divert ourselves with, and the ways we communicate with one another are increasingly defined by the Internet, and the computers, tablets, and cell phones that connect us to it. None of this would be possible were it not for sand. High-purity silicon dioxide particles are the essential raw materials from which we make computer chips, fiber-optic cables, and other high-tech hardware—the physical components on which the virtual world runs. The quantity of quartz used for these products is minuscule compared to the mountains of it used for concrete or land reclamation. But its impact is immeasurable.For most of the twentieth century, there were many sand mines. Mining and agriculture are the earliest activities of man and are the fundamental requirements in the development of civilized societies. The origin of mining dates back to the era of human evolution. Our ancestors have excavated flint and other minerals, rock fragments, etc., for making weapons for hunting, sizing the collected materials, and rescuing themselves from wild animals. Since then, the dependence of man on minerals and building materials have increased as the society evolved through the ages. Now, a stage has reached where the society cannot exist without the products of mining and quarrying and its demand will continue to grow in future also.In the past, the mining sector was least concerned about the environmental repercussions of resource extraction. Today, the scenario has changed significantly as the stakeholders concerned have started giving more importance to the environmental impacts of resource extraction activities. This change in attitude, in turn, has lead to bringing in stringent regulations on mining and quarrying activities of all the natural resources. Many countries have brought out policies and legislations to lessen the impact of mining on various environmental components of the biological system. Planning for development, exploration, and conservation of mining are the three important issues that need to be addressed for the better management of the mining sector on one hand and conservation of minerals on the other.For hundreds of years, sand and gravel are being used as aggregate materials for the construction of roads, buildings, and other civil works. As a result, the demand of sand is also rising exponentially in tune with the expansion of transportation and construction infrastructures.Despite the fact that sand is renewable in the geologic time periods, it is considered a nonrenewable resource as its regeneration is meager in the human calendar years. As the sand and gravel resources are extracted easily from the inchannel or near-channel sources, people depend on the river sources of sand greatly compared to the other aggregate sources. This has altered considerably the river systems and the channel hydraulics in addition to the reduction of productivity within the in-channel and near-channel areas.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.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 [but alas, it's recently revoked for the construction of the Ivory Tower], Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted or completely banned exports of sand to Singapore.'Buy land,' Mark Twain once famously said. 'They’re not making it any more.' Clever quip, but completely wrong. The Dutch have been building artificial land, much of it below sea level, since the eleventh century, damming wetlands and pumping them dry. Peter Stuyvesant, the first governor of what would later be called Manhattan, began expanding the island back in 1646, mostly with earth displaced by the construction of buildings and canals. Sand, however, is the material used most often to create new land. Sand dredged from underwater built long stretches of Chicago’s lakefront, as well as large portions of Marseilles, Hong Kong, and Mumbai. In the 1850s, developers filled shallow areas of San Francisco Bay with sand scraped from nearby hilltops to create what is now the city’s Financial District. Elsewhere in the United States, sand has been used to create artificial islands from scratch, including San Francisco’s Treasure Island, Southern California’s Balboa Island, and Seattle’s Harbor Island.Cities are attracting millions more people every year, and port cities are some of the most attractive: Eight of the world’s ten biggest cities are on the ocean. Fully half of the world’s population lives within sixty-two miles of a coastline. Those cities need space to house all those people, not to mention for the factories, ports, and other places where those people work. Many seaside megacities, from Tokyo to Lagos, are already densely packed, but are hemmed in by mountains, rivers, or deserts, making it tough to expand farther inland.Sand, it turns out, can not only make the concrete and glass for the buildings sheltering those people, but also the ground on which those buildings sit. Beginning in the1970s, advancing technology made it easier and cheaper to simply create more land. Bigger dredging ships equipped with extremely powerful pumps came on the market, capable of hauling up marine sand from ever greater depths and delivering it in ever greater quantities with ever greater accuracy onto predetermined places. As of 2017, the biggest dredge in operation was more than 700 feet long; stood on end, it would overtop a sixty-story apartment building. It carries a pipe that can pull up sand from 500 feet below the water’s surface.The sand underneath the water isn’t safe, either. Sand miners are increasingly turning to the seafloor, 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 beneath 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. 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. 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.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 dolphins and the Royal Turtle. 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.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, 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.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.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.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. 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.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.Even after the sand miners are done, the battered landscape they leave behind can be startlingly dangerous. 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 dozen people.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. At the other extreme are outright criminals, from petty thieves to well-organized gangs willing to kill to protect their sand business. 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 jailed 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.So what is to be done?Stronger government regulations can prevent, or at least mitigate, much of the harm caused by sand mining. They do in most of the developed world. Most restrictions on sand mining are relatively recent, however.Activism can make a big difference, too. Aggrieved citizens living near existing or proposed mines can and do lobby to keep them smaller, quieter, cleaner, and safer—or to keep them out of their backyard altogether. All of us have to recognize, though, that there is a price to be paid for protecting the environment and local residents’ aesthetic sensibilities.""Finally, " the Moon intended to close discussion. "Sandman, as what Metallica sang, has cradled our dreams, made us throw sand away for an Ivory Tower. Indeed, the Ivory Tower has its momentum, but wait, for whom the Ivory Tower's bell tolls? For the general public? Or, perhaps, simply to quench Mr. So-and-so's ambition? Isn't it more appropriate to build a Water Tower, which will transmit knowledge to all fields of ricefields, which will bring literacy to the whole society, in order to lead to a just and civilized society, as well as to fulfill the requirements of a democratic society? And Allah knows best."The river began to recede, reflection of the moon's light scattered on its surface. She left while singing Metallica's Enter Sandman,Exit light, enter night, take my hand!We're off to Never-never Land! *)
- Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, 2018, Riverhead Books
- Pettijohn, Potter, Siever, Sand and Sandstone, 1972, Springer-Verlag
- D. Padmalal & K. Maya, Sand Mining: Environmental Impacts and Selected Case Studies, 2014, Springer
*) "Enter Sandman" written by Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield & Kirk Hammett
