Philip Marsden (Granta (UK, on sale) (US, 4 November))
Travel writer Philip Marsden lives on the river Fal in Cornwall, UK. About 3500 years ago, after a little tin was added to copper and the Bronze Age was set in motion, vast quantities of tin from the mines inland made their way down this river, across to Europe and beyond. As copper had and iron later would, bronze revolutionised our lives. It shaped how we fought, traded and lived 鈥� so much so that experts talk of 鈥渂ronzisation鈥� as the beginnings of globalisation.
In his new book, Under a Metal Sky: A journey through minerals, greed and wonder, Marsden follows those trade routes, pushing east across Europe in this engrossing history of the metals and rocks that underpinned what we call progress.
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In the Netherlands, we see how unregulated peat-cutting in the past transformed the nation鈥檚 fortunes, but ultimately opened the country up to flooding by the sea, the common sense of leaving the land intact no match for the insatiable thirst for energy. And in the Harz mountains in Germany, at one of Europe鈥檚 first major silver mines, Marsden explores the legacy of excavation in the local poisoning of the land and the global economy that the metal set in motion.
Via Slovenia鈥檚 mercury mines and the radon spas of Austria, we come at last to the Georgian mountains, where men have panned for gold in the same rivers for centuries.
Marsden spent his childhood rock collecting, and he is familiar with the addiction of the quest and the discovery. His tale is of our enduring fascination with the world, our collective curiosity and awe as we sought out gems and rocks that would transform how we related to it.
He is especially drawn to the ideas of visionaries whose imaginations were fired by these subterranean wonders: people like Goethe, whose time in Germany鈥檚 silver mines led him to perceive the whole world as interconnected and ever-changing, and Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor in the 16th century, who was a rock-collector and patron to a vast team of alchemists who sought to penetrate the universe鈥檚 mysteries.
But as much as these rocks have brought out the best in us, their rarity and finitude has always been a challenge to creatures who struggle to keep their greed in check. The story of any resource is a tale of hubris, of how everything becomes a poison when it is consumed without restraint. The more these materials liberated us, the faster we devoured. As the scientific method won out over the world view of the alchemists, writes Marsden, it became easier to separate the part from the whole, to ignore consequences. Humans persisted in drinking radium for its supposed health benefits, even as their bones crumbled. They persisted in sending men down mercury mines, even as they coughed themselves to death.
If we could understand our lust for these materials, suggests one archaeologist working in Georgia to Marsden, we might understand everything we need to know about who we are. While the technologies might adapt, as Marsden examines in a coda on lithium, the impulses remain the same as when we first grubbed up ochre out of the ground and daubed it on our bodies.
Perhaps we are transitioning from fossil fuels into an 鈥渁ge of metals鈥�, but, as Marsden writes, at some of the world鈥檚 largest lithium mines in South America, the water courses are polluted, the water table is depleted and the local people remain in poverty. Goethe鈥檚 Faust realised long ago that our unchecked transformation of the world could only lead to disaster. But there are those who still refuse to believe that nature will ultimately be calling in a reckoning.
Adam Weymouth鈥檚 new book, , is published this month
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