By Ediz K

‘I was standing on the edge of a precipice looking down into the deepest hole I had ever seen.’

Thrown immediately into first-person narrative, it wouldn’t be entirely misguided to assume that you were reading the opening paragraph of an action novel, but this unique style is just one of the many ways Ed Conway makes his book Material World: A Substantial Story Of Our Past And Future such a brilliant read. In a world filled with consumerism and debate over such habits, Conway offers a sophisticated yet easy-to-read insight into the six raw materials that he believes form the foundations of modern civilisation and the benefits and problems that they have provided us.

 

Aside from a short introduction and conclusion, Conway completely focusses his writing on the ‘protagonists’ and sometimes ‘antagonists’ of his book: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. Structured into chapters with the aforementioned titles, the book is easy to unpack and to revisit should you need information on a specific material. Sand and salt are very much presented as the unsung heroes of the modern world and are the two that, for me, were the most insightful. Conversely, iron, copper, and oil were very much expected, and although Conway still managed to surprise and shock me with some of his data, these three parts of the book felt more familiar. Finally, lithium is presented as the material of tomorrow and as the one that will save us from the environmental problems caused by fossil fuels. Environment is very much the overarching subject that connects all these parts, and Conway places a great emphasis on the effect that both the extraction and processing of the materials can have on the environment. Although he is interested in offering history and background knowledge on the different materials, the book is ultimately forward-looking, and the focus on the future is another one of the factors that make it so relevant and worth reading.

 

Conway’s incorporation of his own travels into his book is what makes a potentially dull topic interesting. From copper mines in Chile to chemical factories in Germany, Conway includes many real-life locations, which help us visualise supply chains that otherwise seem nearly intangible to the reader. This helps ground the story and ensure that the very real and tangible link that these materials have to our world is not lost in a stream of hypotheticals and data. His interactions with local people at these locations further help establish this link and make the book feel like an exciting narrative nonfiction. I very much felt as if I was being taken on a trip around the world to distant locations and that the book provided not only a learning but also a travelling experience. Arguably the only downside of this technique would be that at certain points I felt that Conway slipped into long stretches of description, which convoluted the overall message that he was attempting to convey. However, these moments were few and far between, and by the end of a certain part of the book, I always fully grasped the criticisms and evaluations Conway had regarding a material.

 

Despite his focus on the environment, Conway never strays into the extremity, never making bold general claims that we have gotten so used to seeing across the media. It’s abundantly clear to anyone with a bit of background knowledge that we cannot simply stop using fossil fuels, and Conway addresses this, incorporating this reality into his proposed solutions. He consistently gives space to address both the environmental issues surrounding the raw materials and how solving these issues is equally problematic. His conclusion is refreshing to read and ties in seamlessly with the facts he presents the reader throughout the book: fossil fuels and raw material extraction are harmful, but we couldn’t have gotten to where we are today as a civilisation without them. Conway’s travels have allowed him to see a side of the environmental crisis that is invisible to someone staring at data behind a screen, and yet his stance is neither provocative to hardline environmental activists nor to those who deny the crisis altogether. 

 

Conway’s neutral stance combined with his vivid storytelling of real-life travels makes Material World an unusually clear insight into the foundations of modern humanity and the environmental crisis in a world where every day people stray more to extremes. Although at times slightly long-winded, Conway employs a narrative non-fiction style of writing that takes you on a journey through deserts, lakes, and fields all while creating explicit links between data, hypotheses, and the real world. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and the insights it gave me helped me ever more appreciate the world that we live in. Combining elements of resource management, geopolitics, and the environmental crisis, Ed Conway’s Material World: A Substantial Story Of Our Past And Future is a must read, not only for geography students but for anyone who wishes to more deeply understand how materials that have existed for millennia built the world that we live in today.

 

‘We are also capable of living far more sustainable, cleaner lives, diminishing our destruction and contamination and living in closer harmony with the planet. We will not do so by eschewing or dismissing the Material World, but by embracing it and understanding it. These six substances helped us survive and thrive. They helped us make magic. They can do it again.’