Concrete Solarities

8 Concrete Solarities Cristián Simonetti In a 2019 interview with The Economist on the occasion of his 100th birthday, Nobel Prize winner famous for his Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock, proposed a four-point plan to save humankind from climate disaster, the first point I focus on here. According to Lovelock, humans should first retreat to megacities. The proposal responded largely to the 140 million people expected to migrate from their countries by 2050 as a result of climate change. In Lovelock’s words: “Humans should go to megacities if they want to avoid the worst dangers of climate change. Mainly because a city is a smaller unit to control and regulate the composition of the atmosphere, the soil. Rather similar to the nests of invertebrates of various kinds: ants, wasps, bees.”1 Key to this proposal in an awareness foundational to the Gaia Hypothesis, wherein the earth behaves like a single complex self-regulating living entity. According to it, the soil 1 The full plan included in the following order: 1) “Retreat to Megacities”; 2) “Use Nuclear Energy”; 3) “Artificially Control the Earth’s Temperature”; and 4) “Let Artificial Intelligence Take Over.” See The Economist, “How to Save Humankind (According to James Lovelock),” YouTube, July 26, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuGj5n_vYz4. 117 solarities Fig. 1. “Without the sun there is no happiness.” Santiago residents protesting about urbanization blocking sunlight. Photograph by the author. plays a crucial role in regulating the atmosphere’s composition, as plants exchange nutrients and energy across earth and sky. Yet when considering its etymology, the word “disaster” underlying Lovelock’s proposal is a fitting term to describe how urban dwellers have increasingly found themselves. From the late-medieval Latin “dis” and “astrum,” the latter linked to the Greek term “astron,” the word refers to a state of disorientation resulting from a sudden disconnection from the stars. This is precisely the state in which urban dwellers in Santiago find themselves at times nowadays, as the campaign “without the sun there is no happiness” lead by local residents in Santiago illustrate; residents who experience isolation from the sun as their city grows in height (fig. 1). Historically, lack of sunlight has been responsible for a number of health issues in the human populations, most notably rickets, a bone-deformation disease described initially in northern Europe by the Polish scientist Jędrzej Śniadecki at the time of the industrial revolution when buildings were increasingly constructed in close proximity, and 118 concrete solarities smoke from coal burning clouded the urban atmosphere. Diseases related to sunlight deprivation also include osteomalacia and osteoporosis in adults, as well as multiple other long-term conditions.2 Understanding the relationship between sunlight and bone health spurred global campaigns in the 1930s to enrich dairy products with vitamin D. This ancient hormone has been produced for over 500 million years by some of the earliest forms of life on earth and is critical to the metabolization of calcium, affecting skeletal health in most vertebrates.3 Lovelock’s proposal is paradoxical in yet more profound ways. To achieve massive urbanization cost-effectively would require the use of concrete on a scale that would obscenely exceed the current rates of production and consumption of the fastest-growing economies today. These would include China which, during the past decade, has produced and consumed in only three years more concrete than the United States has in its entire history. In its association with steel, concrete is arguably the material that has most significantly contributed to spread modernity’s narrative of progress, the very same narrative signaled often as responsible for the current environmental crisis. Advancing forwards on the road of civilization, concrete has provided modernity with a solid and impermeable platform from which to transcend its rural origins while suffocating the exchange of nutrients and energy on which soil formation and plant growth, empowered by sunlight, have depended geologically.4 Moreover, concrete is also a substantial contributor to global warming because the production of cement, concrete’s agglutinating substance, is alone responsible for between 5 and 8 percent of global carbon emissions — figures that can increase 2 3 4 These include multiple sclerosis, hypertension, cancer, diabetes, and depression, among others. Matthias Wacker and Michael F. Holick, “Sunlight and Vitamin D: A Global Perspective for Health,” Dermato-endocrinology 5, no. 1 (2013): 51–108. Cristián Simonetti and Tim Ingold, “Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018): 19–31. 119 solarities by up to 10 percent, depending on the academic source, significantly exceeding the impact of more notorious industries such as air transport. Interestingly, despite the cosmological isolation that concrete generates as urban infrastructure rises, concrete production is silently tied to the powers of our primary star. Cement results from the burning of limestone, a sedimentary rock made of petrified shells, the appearance of which relates closely to the emergence of bones in evolution, both resulting from a sudden calcification of the oceans that occurred when calcium appeared in the fossil record. Emerging out of this calcification was the so-called Cambrian explosion, an intense diversification of lifeforms out of which most animal phyla known today emerged. In burning the remaining exoskeletons of sea creatures that formerly constituted ancient, submerged reefs, urban dwellers have somewhat created their own reefs on land to protect their fragile bodies. But this has come at an extremely high prize. Not only have they deprived themselves of the exchange of nutrients and energy on which plant growth depends at the ground level, but people’s relationship to the cosmos, and the sun in particular, appears increasingly abject with the rise of urban infrastructure. Moreover, in their Prometheus efforts to emulate the powers of the sun on earth, humans have put themselves at risk from its influence by warming the planet — an influence of which life on earth, human and other-than-human, is simultaneously a product. Inside a rotary kiln at Melón, the oldest industry to produce cement in Chile, furnaces operate at around 1900º Celsius, that is, a third of the sun’s surface temperature (fig. 2).5 This is accomplished by burning fossilized shells with fossil fuels, both of which are nothing but fossilized sunlight. The joint calcination of these substances releases approximately a kilogram of CO2 per kilogram of cement produced, contributing irrevers5 120 To reduce carbon emissions, a recent start-up funded by Bill Gates has been unsuccessfully exploring the possibility of condensing solar light to produce cement. Daniel Oberhaus, “A Solar ‘Breakthrough’ Won’t Solve Cement’s Carbon Problem,” Wired, November 22, 2019, https://www.wired. com/story/a-solar-breakthrough-wont-solve-cements-carbon-problem/. concrete solarities Fig. 2. Inside Melón’s rotary kiln. Photograph by the author. ibly to the acceleration of global warming through the absorption of sunlight into the atmosphere. Reflecting on the relationship between solar energy and concrete is critical when thinking of the human condition in the Anthropocene.6 With more than 50 percent of the world’s population now living in cities, concrete is not only currently the most abundant building material surrounding humans but, according to many, including Lovelock, their only escape from climate disaster. Furthermore, it is also the most abundant anthropic rock ever produced in earth history, the vast surfaces of which, poured mostly over the past century, make the material a candidate to mark the stratigraphic onset of the new epoch.7 Famously baptized in Victorian times by Joseph Aspidin as an “artificial rock,” concrete resonates intimately with the image of an epoch defined by humanity’s capacity to become a geological 6 Cristián Simonetti, “Dwelling in the Anthropocene,” in Global Changes: Ethics, Politics and Environment in the Contemporary Technological World, eds. Luca Valera and Juan Carlos Castilla (New York: Springer Open, 2020), 141–51. 7 Colin Waters and Jan Zalasiewicz, “Concrete: The Most Abundant Novel Rock Type of the Anthropocene,” in Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, vol. 1: Geologic History and Energy, ed. Scott Elias (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018), 75–86. 121 solarities force of planetary proportions. Natural yet cultural, geological yet social, this synthetic rock sits literally on the edge of both, especially knowing how separations between matter and spirit have been mapped traditionally in the western imagination on a division between earth and sky.8 Since its modern rediscovery, enough concrete has been poured to separate momentarily the entire surface of the earth from the sky with a kilogram of concrete for every square meter. Perhaps, after much discussion on terminology, the new epoch should be named the Concretocene, a term that can do justice both to the interests of geologists and humanities scholars involved respectively in discussions around how to date and to name the new epoch. Whereas stratigraphers have been focusing their efforts in finding a globally isochronous marker to signal the start of the new epoch, humanities scholars have been concerned with how the term masks an unequal distribution of environmental responsibility.9 Concrete provides a relatively isochronous marker in geological timescales that is widely distributed and that provides a distinct cartographic clue as to who on earth is largely responsible for the environmental crisis.10 Bearing in mind the importance of concrete’s use for the growth of Chile’s neoliberal experiment, it is somewhat unsurprising that, since the October 18, 2019 riots, much of the discontent Santiaguino protesters have expressed has been so directly focused on upsetting this anthropic stratum. Protesters at the front lines have organized into clans, where members assume different roles in their fight against Carabineros, Chilean police forces. In charge of procuring weapons from the urban 8 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 95. 9 Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–69. 10 Cristián Simonetti and Tim Ingold, “Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018): 19–31. 122 concrete solarities Fig. 3. Miner. Photograph by Laura González Márquez. landscapes, in this case concrete stones, are so-called “miners,” whose systematic work over the months have turned Plaza de la Dignidad, the area designated as the battlefield, literally into a mining ground (fig. 3).11 For many protesters this mining ground is now a symbol of a fight for social equity, as well as indigenous and environmental rights, against private interests. 11 The plaza known officially as Plaza Baquedano, site of most protests and celebrations in Santiago, was re-baptized by protesters as Plaza de la Dignidad. Magdalena Claude, “Retrato de un Clan de la Primera Línea,” CIPER, January 6, 2020, https://ciperchile.cl/2020/01/06/retrato-de-unclan-de-la-primera-linea/. 123 solarities References Claude, Magdalena. “Retrato de un Clan de la Primera Línea.” CIPER, January 6, 2020, https://ciperchile.cl/2020/01/06/ retrato-de-un-clan-de-la-primera-linea/. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011. Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–69. DOI: 10.1177/2053019613516291. Oberhaus, Daniel “A Solar ‘Breakthrough’ Won’t Solve Cement’s Carbon Problem.” Wired, November 22, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/a-solar-breakthrough-wontsolve-cements-carbon-problem/. Simonetti, Cristián. “Dwelling in the Anthropocene.” In Global Changes: Ethics, Politics and Environment in the Contemporary Technological World, edited by Luca Valera and Juan Carlos Castilla, 141–51. New York: Springer Open, 2020. Simonetti, Cristián, and Tim Ingold. “Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018): 19–31. DOI: 10.1558/jca.33371. The Economist. “How to Save Humankind (According to James Lovelock).” YouTube, July 26, 2019. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=HuGj5n_vYz4. Wacker, Matthias, and Michael F. Holick. “Sunlight and Vitamin D: A Global Perspective for Health.” Dermatoendocrinology 5, no. 1 (2013): 51–108. DOI: 10.4161/ derm.24494. Waters, Colin, and Jan Zalasiewicz. “Concrete: The Most Abundant Novel Rock Type of the Anthropocene.” In Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, Volume 1: Geologic History and Energy, edited by Scott Elias, 75–86. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018. 124