Vince Beiser

Mining for rare-earth metals has severe environmental consequences. Speaking with Elizabeth Kolbert, the journalist Vince Beiser says that the U.S. needs more of it.

Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped?

In 2021, 15 percent of the U.S. prison population were serving a sentence that exceeded natural life expectancy.

The processor that makes your laptop or cell phone work was fabricated using quartz from this obscure Appalachian backwater.

North Carolina's Sibelco announced that production has restarted at its mining and processing operations in Spruce Pine.

Sand is the second most-used resource after water, but it's unregulated and ripping environments apart.

Five insights from the book Power Metal on why renewable energy and EVs alone won't fix the climate crisis.

Rich nations mine just a fraction of e-waste, leaving $60 billion a year in critical metals wasting away in boxes and drawers. But in West Africa, a dangerous recycling work is thriving.

New iPhones and Teslas come with an insatiable demand for lithium and other 'critical metals.'

Vince Beiser's tour of the "Electro-Digital Age" puts resource extraction at the center

One of the two companies that manufacture high-purity quartz used for making semiconductors from mines in a western North Carolina community harmed by Hurricane Helene is operating again

Elizabeth Kolbert reviews "Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization," by Ed Conway, and "So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything," by Chip Colwell.