Rocks Are Alive

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As I embarked on research and travel for a book on Earth’s metals and minerals, I hoped to uncover some of those patterns that the natural world sometimes reveals upon closer inspection, deep resonances that spread across disciplines like the refrains of a piece of music – haunting, beautiful, and true. And this has happened several times. Early on, in an abandoned arsenic factory in Cornwall, in a century-old dead zone of lifeless soil, I came across a paradox.

Arsenic is a highly toxic metalloid. It is colorless, tasteless and odorless. It was the poison of choice for murderers for millennia. The dose can be regulated for a specific death – sudden, gradual or prolonged – and its effects on the body are difficult to trace. Nero used it to kill his brother-in-law. The Borgias, a noble family of Spanish Renaissance origins, stockpiled arsenic-laced cantarella for the dismissal of cardinals, kings and popes. The Chinese used it as a chemical weapon. Cornish arsenic found a ready market in the United States where, from the end of the 19th century, half a million tonnes were dispersed in an attempt to defeat the Colorado potato beetle. The beetle developed resistance, but the arsenic remained in the soil for another 9,000 years.

Something else comes out of the ground when we extract these metals and minerals – and that’s hubris.

At the same time, arsenic was widely used as a medicine. It was applied to skin diseases, blood diseases, rheumatic diseases, malaria, diabetes, diphtheria, tuberculosis, cancers, syphilis, scrofula, snake bites. By the late 1800s, according to medical historian Jérôme Nriagu, “all major illnesses were subject to arsenotherapy…at no other time in human history has the health of nations depended so much on a single element.”

Earth materials all contain a similar message. It’s a gift. They do magic. As a species, we have learned to harness this magic and use it for our own purposes. It completely changed us. But such gifts carry dangers. Something else comes out of the ground when we extract these metals and minerals – and that’s hubris. Their powers have made us dizzy and installed greed in our politics and our societies, deep in our souls. Only now are we realizing the true costs.

Use a little and the benefits are vast, use too much and suffer the consequences. “All things are poison,” wrote Paracelsus in the 16th century, “it is the dosage alone that makes the poison.”

Writing about nature – today, in the 21st century – is not only urgent but engaging. Animals and plants offer complexity, charm and energy: the fascinating mystery of life. But stones? They are dead and dusty things, surely. Having been interested in them all my life – not as a geologist, but as a pure amateur – I had the presentiment that this hypothesis was not true, that in their form and their process, they were closely linked to life, to our history and to our imagination.

Two reading moments stand out from my research, pivotal moments that confirm the idea that while rocks are not alive in the conventional sense, they are not dead either – in technical terms, that the lithosphere is as much a part of the ecosphere as the biosphere. One sentence is taken from a book by the eminent geologist Marcia Bjornerud: “more than 40 percent of all mineral species on Earth are in some sense biogenic,” that is, they are the result of organic activity. Chalk, limestone and cherts are made up of plankton shells, oxygenating microbes “grow” the iron, coal is made up of decomposed plant matter.

“It’s the dosage alone that makes the poison.”

The second was a passage from Mircea Eliade’s ethnographic study of ancient metallurgy: “the imaginary world… was born with the discovery of metals.” He went on to suggest that “metals opened up a new mythological and religious universe.” A bold statement that both excited me and aroused my skepticism. In a sense, my book…Under a metal sky—is an attempt to prove Eliade’s point. It also shed light on a moment in prehistory, that primitive experience, where a piece of dull stone was placed in a fire and a bright liquid was seen oozing from it.

From dead rock something transformative was born; hardened, this liquid has transformed lives in a dozen different ways. It has also forever changed our relationship with the planet. Now the Earth was a treasure chest, a box containing tricks so powerful that it was as if, as the alchemists believed, the materials themselves were festering in the belly of the earth.

On a personal level, the conception of this book goes back a long time, to a day shortly before my eighth birthday when a chance discovery changed the course of my life. I was one of those geeky kids whose eyes were glued to their feet, looking for anything that glowed in the ground or offered a pattern in the mess of nature. I had a geological hammer and chisel and used them without shame on any piece of exposed rock: old quarries, cliffs, human walls.

During my first weeks at an English boarding school, I came across a large round stone, half buried in the woods. I whacked it with my hammer and watched in wonder as it opened. Inside were the outer coils of a giant ammonite. For weeks I was ripping the case off to remove the case. Little by little, the fossil came into light and the scale of its 100 million year old form was clear. It was spectacular. I was celebrated by the boys and staff. But nothing has ever been so close to the first moment of discovery: the metallic smell of freshly cracked limestone, the shock and joy of seeing what was inside.

Sometimes I think the entire course of my career – decades of travel, research and writing – was triggered in that moment. It established the belief that beneath the surface of the world lies another world waiting to be exposed, a desire to go in search of it, and the belief that a hopeful hammer blow will, if the place is right, unlock a priceless storehouse of stories, ideas, and truths.

Read an extract from Philip Marsden’s new book, Under a metal sky, here.

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Main image: mineral vision / Shutterstock

• Philip Marsden

  Published on November 20, 2025

  Philip Marsden is the award-winning author of numerous history, travel and fiction books. His latest book Under a metal sky begins underground, in the fragile galleries of the Cornish mines and ends in a village in the Caucasus, in search of gold. In between, it follows a number of stories in central Europe, examining both the magic and danger linked to our prodigious use of earthly materials.