Intensification - Michaela Büsse - Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand

Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand

Michaela Büsse

Arc_heavy_MB_09

Huge amounts of sand have been and continue to be sent to Singapore, even though Vietnam officially banned sand exports in 2017.  Sa Đéc, Vietnam, December 2020.

Intensification
March 2025










Notes
1

United Nations Environment Programme, “Sand and Sustainability: Finding New Solutions for Environmental Governance of Global Sand Resources: Synthesis for Policy Makers” (Geneva: United Nations Environment Programme, 2019).

2

Orrin H. Pilkey et al., Vanishing Sands: Losing Beaches to Mining (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).

3

Environmental Reporting Collective, “Beneath the Sands,” 2023; Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization (Riverhead Books, 2018); United Nations Environment Programme, “Sand and Sustainability”; United Nations Environment Programme, “Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis” (Geneva; United Nations Environment Programme, 2022); Aurora Torres et al., “A Looming Tragedy of the Sand Commons,” Science 357, no. 6355 (2017); Mette Bendixen et al., “Time Is Running out for Sand,” Nature 571, no. 7763 (July 2019): 29–31; Vanessa Lamb, Melissa Marschke, and Jonathan Rigg, “Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 5 (2019): 1511-1528; Christina Larson, “Asia’s Hunger for Sand Takes Toll on Ecology,” Science 359, no. 6379 (March 2, 2018): 964–65; Nicholas Magliocca et al., “Comparative Analysis of Illicit Supply Network Structure and Operations: Cocaine, Wildlife, and Sand,” Journal of Illicit Economies and Development 3, no. 1 (October 4, 2021): 50–73; Global Witness, “Shifting Sands: How Singapore’s Demand for Cambodian Sand Threatens Ecosystems and Undermines Good Governance” (London: Global Witness, 2010).

4

Arpita Bisht, “Conceptualizing Sand Extractivism: Deconstructing an Emerging Resource Frontier,” The Extractive Industries and Society 8, no. 2 (June 2021): 100904; Lamb, Marschke, and Rigg, “Trading Sand, Undermining Lives”; Global Witness, “Shifting Sands.”

5

Bisht, “Sand Futures”; Michelle Ann Miller, “A Transboundary Political Ecology of Volcanic Sand Mining,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 78–96; United Nations Environment Programme, “Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis.”

6

Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993).

7

Michael Welland, Sand: The Never-Ending Story, 1st Edition (University of California Press, 2009).

8

India Block, “Desert Sand Could Offer Low-Carbon Concrete Alternative,” Dezeen, March 24, 2018, .

9

Timothy Goh, “Processed Waste Known as NEWSand May Be Used as Construction Materials Here,” Straits Times, November 25, 2019,

10

Lamb, Marschke, and Rigg, “Trading Sand, Undermining Lives”; Torres et al., “A Looming Tragedy of the Sand Commons.”

11

Welland, Sand, 4.

12

Chester K. Wentworth, “A Scale of Grade and Class Terms for Clastic Sediments,” The Journal of Geology 30, no. 5 (1922): 377–92.

13

Bruno Andreotti, Yoel Forterre, and Olivier Pouliquen, Granular Media: Between Fluid and Solid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.

14

Andreotti, Forterre, and Pouliquen, Granular Media, 1.

15

Laleh Khalili, “A World Built on Sand and Oil,” Lapham’s Quarterly, May 13, 2019, .

16

Ashley Carse and Joshua A. Lewis, “New Horizons for Dredging Research: The Ecology and Politics of Harbor Deepening in the Southeastern United States,” WIREs Water 7, no. 6 (November 2020): e1485.

17

Hillen Roeland and Roelse Piet, “Dynamic Preservation of the Coastline in the Netherlands,” Journal of Coastal Conservation 1, no. 1 (1995): 17–28.

18

Michaela Büsse, “Reclaiming Nature and Identity: Extractive Legacies in Singapore Development History,” in Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest, vol. 2, eds. Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin (Berlin/Singapore: K. Verlag and Singapore Art Museum, forthcoming 2025).

19

Joshua Cameroff, “Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk,” Harvard Design Magazine 39, Winter 2014.

20

Khalili, “A World Built on Sand and Oil.”

21

Global Witness, “Shifting Sands.”

22

Milica Topalović, “Constructed Land: Singapore in the Century of Flattening,” in Constructed Land: Singapore 1924-2012 (Zurich: ETH Zurich DArch and Future Cities Laboratory, 2014), 56.

23

Tania Murray Li, “What Is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 4 (October 2014): 589–602.

24

Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

25

Mandana E. Limbert and Elizabeth Emma Ferry, Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Their Temporalities (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2009), 6.