An Environmentalist in Favor of More Consumption
In the pleasing quietness of his house—a place where Pakistani prayer rugs lie in maroon rectangles on top of clean, white, wall-to-wall Berber carpet—Saleem Ali tends his treasure. There is the soft laughter of his two sons upstairs, “needful treasures in my life,” he calls them in the dedication to his new book, Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and A Sustainable Future.
But more traditional treasures lie in wooden display cases against two walls of the dining room: cinnabar and amber; green malachite (“very common stuff,” he says) and uncut opal (“good opal can be more expensive than diamonds,” he says). There’s ruby from Cambodia and an orange slippery shard of salt from his native Pakistan. These and other items he has collected from around the globe are mostly minerals and stones, composed of elements, dug from the earth.
Why do you collect this stuff, I ask him. “The world is such a wondrous place,” he says, turning a glittering nugget to and fro under the display-case light, “And the materials of the world, the natural materials, are so beautiful.”
His collection is not large, nor exceedingly valuable. “I’m not a very organized collector,” he says. But it evokes the many places he has visited—and crystallizes, almost literally, what he believes is a fundamental human desire to collect the earth’s mineral resources. He calls this the treasure impulse. (more…)
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