SOLID

After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth.

Each year, we humans pour enough concrete to cover England. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world, surpassed only by China and the US.

Our grey world is now bigger than our green world, as concrete outweighs the combined carbon mass of trees.

In the last 60 years, humans have produced 8bn tonnes of plastic, but humans produce more than 8 bn tonnes of cement every 2 years.

Concrete is how we tame nature, create shelters and protect ourselves from the elements but concrete entombs our soil, chokes our rivers and disconnects us from the natural world, lessening our fertility and magnifying the extreme weather it shelters us from.

Concrete is hard and degrades slowly, very slowly serving our human longing for solidity and desire to hold back time. Concrete is a metaphor for our human inability to accept change, ageing, death and dying. Our human desire for the ground to feel solid, the earth to feel solid, for life to feel solid but the earth is not solid, life is not solid, nothing is solid….

The power structures built on concrete will only fall, and they need to fall, when we humans remember our fertility, our future and that we only need a solid conviction to change.

#beinghuman #future #architecture