SAND

Sand, composed primarily of finely granulated rock, mineral, and shell particles, is an elemental part of our world. It makes up beaches, sea floors, or dunes. It is also found in streets, house walls, and shore infrastructure. But what makes coastal sand special?

Limestone formations along shores and sand stockpiles in harbours suggest an inert material waiting to be used in construction and manufacturing. Beach sand is used in concrete and reclaiming land from the sea. Limestone gets ground up to obtain cement. Harnessing coastal sand’s crystalline structure can yield smooth textures and robust forms. In concrete, sand acts as a binder producing tensile strength. But sand grains can also be poured and even act as liquefiers, for instance in fracking. Therefore, anthropologists Simonetti and Ingold (2022:7) write, “a particle of sand may be solid with regard to its crystalline structure, but sand en masse, as in a desert, in dunes, or even pouring though the waist of an hourglass, behaves very much as a fluid as it is sculpted into forms of movement such as whirls, waves and swellings” ¹.

Humans and nonhumans have sculpted sand into edifices, tools, and art for millennia. Ants work sand into intricate mounds. Beachgrass thrives in sand and helps form dunes. But humans are relying on sand like no other earthly species. For instance, offshore sand dredging provides the sand for beach replenishment as seen in the picture above. Today, river and coastal sands are the most-used resource in the world, right after water ². Because humans are extracting sand faster than it can be replaced, natural scientists are warning of a looming “tragedy of the sand commons” ³. The thirst for sand is so strong that illegal extraction along shores infringes on protected marine territory in many countries, while subsidiaries of multinationals, like Heidelberg Cement, find ways to circumvent local regulations and justify continuous extraction. As the world is becoming “more oceanic” ⁴ due to sea level rise, frontline communities and governments increasingly rely on sand to buttress and fix eroding shorelines. In the shadow of infamous development projects, such as Jakarta’s Great Seawall or Lagos’ Eko Atlantic City, people have devised arts of living on a shifting planet, to borrow Anna Tsing’s idea⁵, a planet whose sand reserves are on the decrease.

These arts are often unseen techniques and mechanisms that communities devise to prevent flooding, stabilize soils, or live in the aftermath of sand mining and industrial pollution. To understand the significance of coastal sand, we need to render these arts visible and learn to understand them in their geological, cultural, and political contexts. What other meanings of sand can we infer from these usages – where does sand also index solidarity, emancipation, and resistance or become a proxy of alternative futures?