Bogolo Kenewendo, Botswana's minerals minister, wore a diamond pendant to the Mining Indaba in Cape Town this February. It was not subtle. Neither was the message. Botswana wants to buy more of De Beers — the company whose stones paid for the roads, the schools, the hospitals, the entire
I. In the annals of imperial expansion, there is a recurring figure: the man of great energy and private fortune who arrives at the periphery of the known world and, finding it insufficiently organised, sets about remaking it according to his own vision. He builds. He restores. He improves. He
Somewhere in the green darkness of southern Venezuela, not far from where the Orinoco breaks into a thousand unnamed tributaries, several men stand in a clearing and pass blueish-black gravel from hand to weathered hand. They do not know — or perhaps they do, and simply cannot afford to care — that
The research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 01 — "Facing the Red Sun" in Chinese — reached the site in June 2025. Four thousand metres below its hull, scattered across the abyssal plain like a giant's discarded marbles, lay polymetallic nodules: black, porous, each one the size of a
This is UNSUSTAINABLE Media, a brand new site by UNSUSTAINABLE that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!