Oil, gas and mining projects are among the most significant challenges to the conservation of biodiversity worldwide. The penetration of extractive industries into areas valued from their biological and/or cultural significance raises challenging questions about the nature of development, the scarcity and sustainability of resources, and the most effective way of ensuring material standards of living for many of the world's poorest people. Treasures of the Earth is a highly readable book that examines these and other big questions surrounding mineral extraction. Saleem Ali, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, takes aim at what he sees as an unwarranted polarity in discussions about the Earth's natural resources, where the extraction and use of non-renewable resources is too often represented as only either virtue (development) or vice (exploitation and degradation). The author's goal is not critique, however, but constructive intervention: to put contemporary debates over the extraction and consumption of resources onto a new footing by providing a nuanced account of the social and cultural roles played by minerals.

The book is made up of nine chapters, plus an introduction and short epilogue and is divided into three whimsically titled parts. ‘The pleasure of treasure’ highlights the cultural mystique that surrounds many minerals (think diamonds, amber or gold), the desires that motivate individuals and groups to acquire materials which have high social value, and how the search for mineral wealth has driven technological and social innovation and the creation of new economies and geographies of settlement (think Johannesburg, San Francisco or Melbourne). ‘Toil and treasure’ outlines the material economy of resource mobilization, and the environment and development challenges associated with extraction. Ali is particularly critical of the resource curse literature for a ‘fatalistic rhetoric’ that ‘exonerate(s) cultural factors and nuances of development’ by not giving full consideration to the social context through which resources (and the revenues they generate) are managed. The final part, ‘Measure for measure’, closes the loop by considering the opportunities for material recycling and the restoration of extractive landscapes, and how the desire for materials might be creatively re-tooled. Treasures of the Earth is impressively interdisciplinary in scope, and perhaps necessarily so. The author draws on intellectual traditions as diverse as chemistry, psychology and philosophy to express the complexity of a material world in which ‘attempts at building human order out of random natural chaos require us to manipulate material in a myriad ways.’ There is a similarly expansive fluidity to the book's historical and geographical scope, with plentiful use of examples and vignettes that go beyond the standard fare of familiar cases and which capitalize on the author's rich experience.

For some, the account of mining and mineral consumption that Ali provides will be too relentlessly even-handed: it pulls its punches when it should be landing them and, in bending over backwards to undo the stigma that has become attached to extractive resources, it inevitability over-reaches. This willingness to consider all perspectives and suspend the calling of villains and saints may be the necessary result of the author's broader project, one that prioritizes a politics of engagement and deliberative dialogue over one of judgement (the author founded the ecominerals listserv a few years ago which engages mining firms and activist non-governmental organizations alike, and which will be familiar to some readers). Indeed, the book's analytical register is strikingly different to either the statistical abstractions or muscularly structural accounts of exploitation that are normally associated with work on ‘need and greed’ around mining. Ali casts oil, gas and other mineral resources as an ‘intimate relationship’ between humans and materials centred on what he terms ‘the treasure impulse’. This term refers to the psychological and cultural attachments that humans make to minerals, and the way these attachments drive the discovery and innovation of new materials. To Ali, the quest for minerals is a fundamental part of common history as human beings and ‘the balance between digging deep for resources and respecting the fragility of our earthly resource base has been our most seminal challenge as a species.’ The true potential of this impulse remains to be tapped, however, as it will be key to the ‘sustainable future’ alluded to in the subtitle. Accordingly, he concludes mankind should ‘embrace our impulses for treasures’ and direct it towards increased efficiencies in material consumption and the search for synthetic alternatives.

The cultural and historical perspective that distinguishes Treasures of the Earth from most other works on the extractive sector is one that reveals and occludes in equal measure. Its considerable advantage is its capacity to collapse the cognitive distance between the familiar routines of daily life for mineral consumers and the extraction of raw materials. Ali's account neatly captures the awesome scale and complexity of the contemporary material economy, and brings society (as consumers) face-to-face with the often paradoxical outcomes that desire for fragments of the inanimate natural world can produce. However, this perspective significantly underplays the political economy of extraction and material consumption, and how structural inequalities in wealth and power are in part produced and sustained through the extraction and consumption of raw materials. Treasures of the Earth prefers to render the causes of prodigious increases in resource consumption (which outstrip population growth and whose geographies map only weakly onto those of population) as cultural and/or psychological impulses rather than the product of social organization or the ‘logics’ of speculative finance and accumulation. For this reviewer, this amounts to a misdiagnosis of the problems for which the book seeks to account. Other readers may find its interest in history and its concern to distil basic principles insufficient, as the book stops short of discriminating among contending and quite different policy approaches for securing a more sustainable material economy. These issues aside, Saleem Ali's book provides an original, entertaining and ultimately optimistic account of society's complex relationship to non-renewable resources.