Drifting in a Cemetery of Sandscapes

Abstract

We do not only encounter sandscapes in beaches, deserts, and playgrounds, but in all the diverse spaces that make use of sand for construction, land reclamation, road building, fossil fuel extraction, and much else. The sand we use to build our cities does not come from nowhere. It has a story to tell. This chapter works with sand’s primary form of drift, saltation—a movement in short hops, leaps, and jumps—to explore how sand connects diverse places, issues, and power relations. Sand drifts across spaces, times, and scales. It is equally at home in land, water, and air. It forms an archive of pulverised stones and fragmented stories. It exists in sandscapes that are as varied and mixed as sand itself. We drift across multiple sandy archives, from the seaside town of Deal, to the neighbouring Goodwin Sands, into African winds, deep time, and sand conflicts in colonial Hong Kong. The chapter asks whether thinking with sand, and thinking as a sandy being, might help us reach our way towards a planetary ethic that welcomes the Earth into our experience of self, and encourage a new thinking from the shoreline.