Every year, humans move more earth, and more rock. More than what rivers carry with them as they rush to oceans and lakes. More than what is eroded by wind, or rain, or seasonal frictions. More than what is hurled out as lava by volcanoes. More, in fact, than all planetary forces combined. And faster, too—a few decades of human activity have displaced more materials than the planet could over millennia. This is what it means to say that humans have become a geological force, that the Earth has entered the era of the Anthropocene.
“Humans,” of course, is far too broad a descriptor to capture the causes, mechanisms, and effects of all this earthly displacement. The generic category of “human” as an agent of change only makes sense if you’re a planet. We all know that some humans—bolstered by the political systems in which they live and the institutions for which they work—are far more powerful than others. The quantity of rock moved by Anglo American in its century-plus of metal mining completely overwhelms that displaced by a migrant scraping the walls of abandoned mine shafts. But the difference is not just a matter of magnitude. More fundamentally, it’s about the inequities that enabled and conditioned this massive scalar difference, and that continue to be amplified by it. The apparent incommensurability of these scales must not blind us to their deep interdependence. This is especially evident in the use of mine waste as building material, which involves a triple extraction: of minerals, of waste, and of human health.