Fast-forward Earth about a million years. Humanity has come and gone—perhaps wiped out by a pandemic or some cataclysmic event, like the dinosaurs before them.
Aliens or maybe even intelligent descendants of today’s apes are digging for clues to what happened long ago. They may or may not find human bones, and they may or may not find metallic remnants of our modern lives. But what they almost certainly would find are crumbling, angular gray blocks covered with dust and tinged with a reddish chemical formed by the oxidation of steel rebar.
If there is a signature material of the Anthropocene, it is concrete. It is the most common human-made substance. We build houses, skyscrapers, bridges, and memorials from it; we drive on it; and we even bury our dead in it. But most of us hardly give the stuff a glancing thought.
Except Robert Courland, that is. He wrote the book on it, quite literally. In Concrete Planet, Courland—a retired tech executive turned writer and historian—traces the nuanced and intertwined history of concrete and modern human civilization. The Romans were […]
I seem to get a “page not found” when I try to read the full article. I would like to read it because I use concrete, especially Portland Cement, which I consider the best. I have also heard of a way to use CO2 to make cement which would be a good way to get rid of some of our problems with CO2.