#sand;

[drunken-boat]

Old wall in the Gobi Desert

Near Dunhuang, Gansu, China 2021

[drunken-boat]

Gobi Desert

Near Dunhuang, Gansu, China 2021

[voidlikesuggestion]

march on, march on my children- to become this parade of fantasy!

[voidlikesuggestion]

and this fantastical dream will become your reality!

[voidlikesuggestion]

up all night, i’d be a goner

without you i’m just a sleepwalker

[rewilddd-blog]

[rewilddd-blog]

Sand

“Hardly anyone thinks about sand, where it comes from or what we do to get it. But a world of seven billion people, more and more of whom want apartments to live in and offices to work in and malls to shop in, can’t afford that luxury anymore.”

– The World’s Disappearing Sand by Vince Beiser. The New York Times, June 23, 2016

Feeling squidgy on the inside, I splash on some sunblock, pull up my socks and take my bike out into the wild. That is, to the park connector (one out of a growing number of people/bike-friendly pathways to Singapore’s parks) behind the apartment block where I live. Several minutes into it and I realise the park connector is dammed up. There are bulldozers rolling by me like elephants on a plain, tens of construction workers going about their business steadfastly – and sand, sand everywhere. “Flood prevention works. To be completed 4Q 2018,” reads a miniscule sign nestled amidst rows and rows of metal fences meant to keep the public out. Yet another construction project has appeared out of nowhere: a phenomenon that Singaporeans have grown accustomed to by now.  The construction worker standing guard doesn’t seem to mind me peeping into the construction site. The entire 3km stretch of hitherto innocuous foot/bike path has been transformed into a foreign desert caked with clay-coloured sand.

Sand is needed to build virtually any modern building, since concrete is essentially sand and gravel held together by wet cement. Sand is also needed for land reclamation, which Singapore does a lot of. My island has increased by over 20% in size in the last sixty years, all thanks to sand. We’re not the first people to have tried this. As it’s been said, “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.” And today, the new city Eko Atlantic that is being built near the coastal city of Lagos, Nigeria – branded “Nigeria’s answer to Dubai” – is designed to be around four meters higher than the rest of Lagos in order to make it more resistant to climate change. Today, the world faces a global sand shortage. This is namely because the number and size of cities in the world has skyrocketed.

“To build those cities, people are pulling untold amounts of sand out of the ground. Usable sand is a finite resource. Desert sand, shaped more by wind than by water, generally doesn’t work for construction. To get the sand we need, we are stripping riverbeds, floodplains and beaches,” wrote Vince Beiser for The New York Times (link above). “Reclamation” is a misnomer. We have, simply, claimed. “Reclamation” is a euphemism for “more”. India, for one, does forbid sand mining in its own backyard. The flipside is that importing sand is extremely expensive and environmentally taxing. Closer to home, the bans which Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam have placed on exporting sand from their own shores have driven sand smuggling to – if reported estimates are anything to go by – unbelievably high thresholds.

With the thought that we have destroyed far more than we have constructed, I thank the construction worker, pedal away from the noise and take a longer route to the park. More:

Such quantities of sand. The Economist, February 28th 2015.

Despite Ban, $1.5M of Cambodian Sand Turns Up in India by Alex Willemyns and Kuch Naren. The Cambodia Daily, November 8, 2013. Sand wars: Singapore’s growth comes at the environmental expense of its neighbours by Lindsay Murdoch. The Sydney Morning Herald, February 26th 2016.