China, the world’s builder, is also the planet’s sand glutton. Today, sand has become so valuable that it is shipped enormous distances: Australia sends boatloads of sand to Arabia for land reclamation projects. A United Nations study calculates, however, that humankind’s total consumption of sand-more than 40 billion tons a year-is now double the amount of sediments being replenished naturally on the Earth by the sum of the world’s rivers. River sand is best: grains of desert sand are often too rounded to serve as industrial binding agents, and marine sand is corrosive. Our modern civilization is built on sand: concrete, paved roads, ceramics, metallurgy, petroleum fracking-even the glass on smart phones-all require the humble substance. ( Watch Paul Salopek's video of scenes from two rivers now being mined for sand in India-the Betwa, in Uttar Pradesh, and the Sone, in Bihar.)
Moreover, there appears to be an infinite supply of the stuff. Illegally mined sand does not conjure the dark romance of, say, blood diamonds, or the pathos of trafficked wildlife. The lowly resource is little more than ground-up rocks, tiny grains of silica and quartz washed down rivers from eroding mountaintops. Sand might seem a strange contraband to most of the world. Here, everyone owns a grievance-even the sand mafia. The other guys down the road are extorting too much from the trucks,” he tells us. “We’re looking for journalists to help us,” one of the burly men says over the growl of the traffic. They have murdered reporters who have exposed the forbidden practice of excavating waterways.
Sand miners have killed law enforcement officers who have attempted to halt the strip-mining of India’s rivers. It fuels a black market that is both preyed on and protected by goons. Every truckload is bound for distant construction sites.
BURLY MEN AT SEA WALK TORRENT
What do these columns of vehicles carry? A torrent of mined sand: the dredged-up riverbeds of the Sindh River and its tributaries in destitute Madhya Pradesh state. Our plastic table quakes from the passage of heavy trucks. Thick-armed, hooded-eyed men who have braked their white SUV to interrogate my walking partner, Siddharth Agarwal, and me at a dhaba, a roadside eatery in northern India. This is his latest dispatch from India.ĭEHRI ON SONE, BIHAR, INDIA“You must be journalists? Are you interested in sand mining?” Writer and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk is a storytelling odyssey across the world in the footsteps of our human forebears.
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