Ethos’ “Elements” series has examined society through one of the most basic ideas humans have used to explain the world around them: four “elements,” earth, water, fire, and air.
Story by Catherine Keck & Stefan Verbano
Photo Illustration by Whitney Highfield

We began with a consideration of water that encompassed Yakama sweat lodges, a West African river said to have saved a nation, and the politics of water shortages. Then we wrote about the way modern societies use the air and defile it through pollution. And, most recently, we considered rituals in various cultures surrounding fire, the sun, and book burning.
The concept of basic elements underlies many cultures, but the four we’ve chosen are specifically from early Greek science. Other, similar four- or five-element concepts exist outside the West—in Japan, Babylon, and China. But in some other cultures, the mixture of elements is different. It may include, wood, metal, void, and so forth.
So for our final installment, we’ve expanded our fourth element into a look at a more universal concept of “the elements,” based in modern, rather than archaic science: the periodic table. It’s appropriate in the original conception, too. From a scientific standpoint, fire is produced by a reaction between various elements. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Air is a mixture, primarily of nitrogen, but also oxygen, argon, and carbon.
The Earth, though, is made of all of the naturally occurring elements in various concentrations. But when we experience most of them, it’s not in their natural forms.
Elements like the ones highlighted here need to be extracted from the earth, often in far-flung places and then refined so they can be used to create the products those of us who live in developed countries use in our everyday lives. That process provides one of the less seemly forms of multicultural interaction.
In the process of obtaining these elements, in addition to cell phones, bicycle frames, soda cans, and car batteries, among other things, we often manufacture wars in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the mining of tantalum, an element used to make cellular phones, fuels conflict between the government and rebel factions.
That’s not to suggest that all international trade is bad—it certainly isn’t. But the consumer of goods in the developed world often buys the products he or she does without a thought to the origins of their components.
We hope that, looking at the elements that make up our planet from that angle will at least shed a little light on the subject for anyone who is curious.
Lithium (Li)
The world’s largest lithium deposit is almost entirely untouched, but that could soon change. The chemical is used chiefly in electronics and batteries, and more than 40 percent of the planet’s share is sitting in the Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia, untapped. But the Bolivian government has been looking for a partner to extract the lithium salts in the area. It may have found one in South Korea, which as of mid-August, looked well-placed in talks with the country’s government. However, the area’s people don’t welcome the project, saying the Bolivian government marginalizes them. They have been detaining tourists and prospectors in the region to try to get their point across.
Hydrogen and Carbon (H & C)
Indonesia was once one of the world’s great oil-producing countries. In the 1970s, the country pumped as much as 1.7 million barrels of oil, composed chiefly of carbon and hydrogen, every day. Now, though, oil production has stagnated in the country, to the point where it now imports more than twice as much as it exports. The country’s state oil subsidy, which has set gasoline prices well below one dollar, is a relic of time when Indonesia was rich in oil. The country’s government has spent much of the decade cautiously increasing oil prices, but constant protests against its doing so make Indonesian leaders nervous. At the moment, the cost of oil subsidies makes up one third of the Indonesian government’s spending.
Tantalum (Ta)
Your cell phone battery might be fueling bloodshed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s estimated that 80 percent of the world’s tantalum, a metal vital to producing batteries, is found in the eastern part of the vast Central African country. Much of that tantalum is in areas controlled by rebel groups, that are engaged in an ongoing war with the country’s central government. Thousands are killed each month as a result of this conflict. Rebel groups extract the mineral and sell it to cell phone manufacturers, using the profits to fund their armies. Australia and Brazil are still the world’s largest tantalum producers, according to U.S. Interior Department estimates, while most cell phones are made using tantalum from those countries. But the trade in Congolese tantalum still poses problems for the international community.
Tungsten (W)
Tungsten has the highest melting point among the metallic elements. It maintains its strength at extreme temperatures, which makes it a key component to rocket engine nozzles as well as other high-temperature technologies. China is currently the world’s largest producer of tungsten. Derived from the minerals wolframite, scheelite, ferberite, and hubnerite, tungsten is usually mined in ore form. Among its plethora of common uses, tungsten is used as the filament inside light bulbs, and its weight makes it ideal for the stabilizing devices used in aircrafts and racecars.
Tungsten is also commonly used as an element in Dense Inert Metal Explosives, or DIME bombs. These experimental explosives are characterized by a smaller and more concentrated blast radius. The DIME bomb is currently being called the newest “genotoxic weapon,” which inflicts horrendous wounds to victims in its radius of explosion.
Lanthanum (La)
Mountain Pass, California, once sat uninhabited in the Mojave Desert, waiting for the sands to rise up and reclaim the outpost and its mine, where rare elements were extracted. Then the Toyota Prius happened. The first highly successful hybrid car ushered in a new trend in fuel-efficient vehicles. Hybrid vehicles rely on batteries containing the element lanthanum, and generally making a more fuel-efficient car requires more lanthanum.
Lanthanum is primarily mined in China, but demand became so steep that the Chinese government decided to impose strict limits on how much lanthanum the country exports to avoid shortages. In their search for new sources of the element, manufacturers turned to Mountain Pass. The outpost sits astride the world’s largest deposit of rare Earth elements, including lanthanum. It was shut down in 2002 because it couldn’t produce lanthanum as cheaply as China. Now a U.S. company is aiming to reopen it by 2011.
Copper (Cu)
In ancient Greece, copper was synonymous with Cyprus. Literally. The word “copper” is derived from the element’s Greek name, “cuprum,” which means “metal of Cyprus” in ancient Greek—or maybe Cyprus itself is named after copper. Nobody can say conclusively. Clumps of nearly pure copper lay on the ground in ancient Cyprus. Copper sculptures and tools from the island were prized in ancient Rome and Greece. Somewhere along the line, people forgot about the association between the country and the element.
Then, in the early part of the 20th century, an American geologist, thumbing casually through a historical text, rediscovered it, and copper mining resumed. However, Cyprus’ place among the world’s copper producers is far more modest now. It has been estimated that Cyprus exports about $9 million worth of copper each year, not so much dwarfed as completely eclipsed by the world’s leading copper-producing economies.
Uranium (U)
Unstable and slightly radioactive, this silvery-white metal has been both a gift and a curse for mankind. The world got its first taste of nuclear warfare in 1945 when “Little Boy” detonated over Hiroshima killing 80,000 people and destroying three-quarters of the city. Since then, the widespread exploitation of Uranium-235’s ability to sustain chain reactions in nuclear power plants has promised industrialized nations safe and sustainable energy, but extraction and disposal methods have proven to be environmentally hazardous. Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan mine the lion’s share of the world’s uranium—with Kazakhstan as its leading exporter—and have forged regional and political trading partners; Uranium ore is present in the Earth at low concentrations, so mining is very volume-intensive and only economical in regions of the earth with sufficiently high concentrations.
Aluminum (Al)
The most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, this reactive, silvery white alloy is Earth’s third most substantial element after silicon and oxygen. It is found in nature fused with over 270 different minerals including bauxite ore, and refined using intense heat and pressure. Global production in 2005 was 31.9 million tons, an amount trumped only by the most utilized metal, iron.
Australia produces about one-third of the world’s bauxite supply, in competition with  mining enterprises in China, Brazil, Guinea, and India. Construction, transportation, food, electronics, explosives and numerous other industries rely on aluminum’s light weight and high thermal and electrical conductivity. Consumer demand for the metal has challenged the means of production in recent years, but the success of recycling campaigns and the availability of cheap electricity has kept the metal in abundant supply.
Tin (Sn)
Corrosion-resistant properties make tin ideal for coating steel, which is used to create eating utensils and soup cans. In addition, molten tin is also used as a component in making windows and windshields. Malaysia, once the world’s largest manufacturer of cassiterite, dominated about a third of the market in the 1970s. However, as of 2004 China and Indonesia are the world’s largest producers of tin. The Democratic Republic of Congo is also a large player in the exportation of thousands of tons of cassiterite, a tin oxide mineral. These statistics remained unreported due to the exploitation of Congolese workers by which traders profit.
The Dominican Republic is one of the largest producers of minerals such as cassiterite. Faced with the choice of either starving or succumbing to intensive labor for next to no pay, miners are exploited and subjected to arduous working conditions in areas including Rwanda and Uganda. The illegal trading of minable resources from the DRC is aiding an ongoing violation of basic human rights of Congolese workers.
Gold (Au)
Coveted since the beginning of recorded time, this soft, illustrious metal has helped the rise and fall of entire empires. From pharaohs who were entombed in “the flesh of the gods,” to the Spanish conquistadors whose lust for gold spurred a worldwide quest, no other element has mesmerized societies with its lustrous shine. But in terms of practical uses, gold is hardly important to human existence—besides in monetary value.
In 2007, China mined 276 tons of the halcyon luxury to become the world’s largest gold producer, breaking South Africa’s more than 100-year first place record. Certain mining techniques, including the dissolution and extraction of gold from low-concentration ore using cyanide, have proven to be environmentally destructive. A dam at a mining works near Bozinta Mare, Romania burst in 2000 and unleashed extraction wastewater containing approximately 100 tons of cyanide into the Tisza and Danube rivers, killing large quantities of fish in Hungary and Serbia.

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Embracing the Elements: Earth