Sand Wars (2013) User Reviews

Is anything safe?

[gian_99 · 9/10 · 18 January 2021]

It was surprising for me to watch this, as I would not have expected a basic, apparently ubiquitous, and cheap commodity (and I am not even sure sand can be considered a commodity) to be bought and sold internationally, and even trafficked.

This was extremely shocking as buildings are a basic feature of our modern life and the average person - no: most people - would not imagine that building a shining office development somewhere might destroy ecosystems or even the homes or livelihoods of people halfway around the world. This kind of problems are never mentioned as the details of how our world works are hidden as technicalities (no, I don't mean to say there is some dark conspiracy... I could have found out the truth about how the building industry works with a 5 minute search on google... it's just people are a- not really interested in knowing how things work b- flooded with useless or meaningless information: meaning, it is ultimately our collective fault bad things happen).

But well about the documentary. It is quite deep and tries to explain what is happening from many different points of view. The scenes are shocking, but well photographed.

It was quite good, if a little depressing, to know a bit more about this subject.

everyone needs to have this information

[Verretto · 10/10 · 20 October 2014]

This was an extremely interesting subject. I live on the west coast of Canada and I had no idea that sand was so vulnerable.

We need to make everyone aware of this matter so that we can start to protect the earth from the effects of over mining the sand. I am in shock that the situation has got to this point with the governments keeping it so quiet.

Keep up the good work by making this film available to as many viewers as possible. The subject deserves all the attention you can give it.

There seems to be a blind spot as to the consequences that depletion of this very valuable material will have on earth. Not to mention the small islands that cannot support life after the affects

Even sand is a problem.

[Zoomorph · 6/10 · 3 March 2021]

Interesting documentary that shows how even sand has become an environmental problem in the modern world. Sand itself isn't really much of a problem (unless you live on an eroding beach) as there's an abundance of it on the planet and more is constantly being made. But the fact that humans are making a problem for themselves out of sand really points back to the overall magnitude of human impact on the planet, which is the elephant in the room that few people want to acknowledge.

Instead of looking at the bigger picture, people tend to prefer to focus on individual little symptoms. If they can "fix" the one little symptom that's in their mind, they'll be at peace until the next one arises, and happily ignore everything out of sight. So, what can we do about the sand problem? Well, this documentary suggests that we use recycled glass (ie. sand) in concrete instead of sand.... This seems laughable and I almost wonder if they are trying to make a joke about the lame ideas that humans have to "fix" our environmental impacts. I think they are serious, though. Overall, the documentary isn't great but it's a fascinating topic, especially if you can look beyond one individual grain of sand and see how it's connected with the rest of the beach of human environmental impacts.