Summary: Despite widespread belief that humanity has exhausted certain natural materials, finding examples of fully depleted materials has proven impossible. While some resources, like malachite, may be harder to find or more regulated, they are not truly extinct. Even materials rumored to be depleted remain available on the market if you know where to look. This challenges the narrative of irreversible material loss.
A few months ago I promised to write a series of posts documenting the world’s lost materials. I was quite excited about it; over time I was hoping to build up a catalogue of all of those substances humanity once used to mine and extract from the earth’s crust, but have now been exhausted.
All of which is why it’s about time I informed you, dear readers, that I failed. After a single post (Malachite) I’m taking the decision to retire the Lost Materials series. Why? Because in trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything.
True: as I wrote in that first post, it’s getting harder to find decent chunks of malachite, but then again, it’s not like there’s no malachite left. Not in the slightest. Many of you kindly sent in suggestions for other minerals I should investigate. One reader suggested Silphium, an ancient much-vaunted Roman plant, but the problem there wasn’t so much that it is or isn’t exhausted but that we don’t really know what silphium actually was.
There were some very useful suggestions of stones we used to have lots of in the UK but don’t seem to have much of anymore – things like Whitby jet or Serpentine or Blue John. But in each case I had to conclude that while we don’t find all that much of these rocks we line on our shores anymore (or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say, we regulate their mining much more) there’s no shortage of similar geological specimens elsewhere in the world. They are certainly not “exhausted”.
I kept looking for exhausted things. Given a fair few species of animal and plant have become extinct in recent centuries, I figured I might have more chance finding a type of wood or herb we don’t have anymore. But even here the commonplace suggestions weren’t quite as compelling as you might have thought.
For instance, in Bill Bryson’s magnificent book At Home, he writes of the particular kind of mahogany used by Chippendale for his extraordinary furniture
Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up – irremediably extinct – within fifty years of its discovery. Some two hundred other species of mahogany exist in the world, and most are very good woods, but they have nothing like the richness and smooth workability of the departed S. mahogani. The world may one day produce better chairmakers than Chippendale and his peers, but it will never produce finer chairs.
But here’s the thing, as far as I can tell (and do write in if I’m wrong about this), Bryson’s not quite right about this. Because there’s actually plenty of Swietenia mahogani out there. True: it’s a protected species, so it’s much harder to get hold of (which, when you think about it, sounds perfectly sensible). But it’s certainly not extinct. Don’t believe me? Look at wikipedia!
That being said, I know for a fact one cannot always rely on Wikipedia. Because another of the wild goose chases I found myself on in search of lost materials – indeed, it was going to be the next in the series of posts on this topic, as I hinted at the end of the last one – was a very particular type of marble. Look at the Wikipedia page for Carrara marble and (at the time of writing at least), the second paragraph declares that the very finest grade of Carrara marble, known as “statuario” is exhausted:
The pure white statuario grade was used for monumental sculpture, as “it has a high tensile strength, can take a high gloss polish and holds very fine detail”. By the late 20th century Carrara’s highest-grade marble had run out
Perhaps, I thought for a moment, statuario was the thing I’d been looking for – the material humankind has indeed exhausted. After all, the marble in Carrara is the product of a very particular moment in geology, when ancient seashells and marine creatures were compressed into an incredibly pure, white vein of stone. Statuario, which Michaelangelo used for some of his great sculptures, is particularly special, because it has an incredibly fine grain, enabling you to carve tiny, beautiful features out of it. Perhaps it was plausible that we might have run out?
But then I did a bit of thinking. If statuario marble were really exhausted that would mean it would be impossible to carve intricate white marble sculptures these days. But I literally know sculptors who are still doing just that. Consider the work of an old friend of mine, Nick Hornby, an artist who has made works out of precisely that supposedly no-longer-available marble.
So then I did a bit of research. I spoke to a couple of people in the marble trade, people involved in quarrying marble in Carrara too. And I discovered that far from being exhausted, there’s enough statuario marble still left in Carrara to last the world four hundred years or more.
The apocryphal story probably found its way to Wikipedia because the vein of statuario rock wiggles its way through the mountains, with the upshot that it might very plausibly be exhausted in one quarry, only to show up in another part of the mountain. But Wikipedia is wrong. It has not run out.
Perhaps if there’s a bit of wisdom to be extracted from this whole wild goose chase it’s that while we like to tell ourselves humankind has exhausted this or that resource, we are much better at talking about it than actually, well, exhausting said resource.
Perhaps I ought to have known this sooner. After all, I gave over quite a large chunk of the copper section of Material World to documenting why, contrary to a lot of doom-laden articles and analyses at various points in history, we never actually ran out of copper. We didn’t even do all that much substitution (we use aluminium a fair bit for things like high voltage power lines, but in part that’s because aluminium is light). We mostly just got a lot better at mining copper.
The flip side of that “getting better at mining” was much bigger holes in the ground. But while there’s no shortage of people fretting about how we are about to run out of copper or oil or gold, there’s also no shortage of people ready to come up with new wheezes in refining, or new locations to find the stuff.
So while this particular series is cancelled after a single episode, in its place I have a plan for a new series of posts. This time, rather than looking at materials we have run out of, I want to look at something else. The underlying message (or one of them) from Material World is that human beings have a pretty healthy, possibly insatiable, appetite for digging stuff out of the ground, this series will focus on the minerals we are still extracting (in some cases in record amounts) even though most people thought we stopped doing it long ago.
This article was published at Material World on 12/23/2024.
