Layer 0 tracks the raw material pulled from the planet in a year at two scales: its mass and its value at the point of extraction - wellhead, mine-mouth or farm gate. Six core categories: energy, construction materials, agriculture, livestock, forestry, minerals.
Everything we pull from the planet in a year: an immense mass, its value at the wellhead a speck.
Twelve thousand years ago a person used about 0,7 tonnes of material a year; today it is 10,5 tonnes per person - roughly 15× as much.
The basic observation is simple: the physical base is enormous, its dollar value at the point of extraction surprisingly small. Every later layer is built on this physical base.
Physical volume
85,06 Gton
The technosphere's annual physical feed, most of the mass is construction material
Resource value
6,49 T $
The value base the next three layers are all built on
Market value
13,19 T $
From wellhead to first sale; the gap is processing and haulage
Logistics
133.174 Gton x km
Total transport work from the point of extraction to the consumer
Mass or value
The same six categories, once by annual mass and once by dollar value at the point of extraction. The two splits do not match: a category that dominates by mass can be small by value.
Mass share
60%
20%
10%
At-source value share
39%
29%
18%
Construction materialsEnergyAgricultureMineralsForestryLivestock
Financial markets talk about gold, lithium and crude oil; yet more than half of the mass extracted is ordinary rock, sand and gravel. Civilization stands not on rare metals but mostly on aggregate, mass is bigger than speculation.
From reserve to stock: one year of material flow
Left: the underground reserve and its status. Middle: the material entering human use each year, drawn at a width proportional to its mass. Right: the fate of that flow - some dissipates within the year, most is added to the accumulated stock.
limitedpractically unlimitedrenewable
Half of the 85 Gton of material pulled from the ground each year never leaves: it locks into the technosphere as concrete, steel, brick and asphalt. That accumulated mass is now 1.100 Gton - 13x a single year's extraction - and grows by 30 Gton a year. The underground reserve feeding it lasts only decades at this rate: even coal, the most abundant, has only about 139 years left.
Critical rate asymmetry
The at-source value of a whole year's raw material ($6,5 trillion) changes hands in the financial markets in about 6 hours. That is the speed gap between the physical base and the abstract layer built on it.
Whose labour sits in which layer
0Extraction955 M · %27,1
1Economy2,5 bn · %70,6
2Wealth79 M · %2,3
3Markets5 M · %0,1
Layer 3 markets turn over about 82× world GDP in a year; the core workforce that runs them is roughly 1/191 the size of Layer 0's.
What's in this layer
Pages that read the Resources layer from different angles. Jump straight to what interests you.
