"Colwell, too, argues that it's time to rethink our ties to the material world. But Colwell is an archeologist, and, as such, he takes a longer view. In So Much Stuff, he seeks to explain how Homo sapiens went from knapping chert to ordering granite countertops. What happened, he asks, 'that led our species from having nothing to needing everything?' . . . The industrialized world was built out of mountains of sand, iron, and copper, and it cannot operate without vast quantities of these or other materials. Colwell traces the problem back even further. Our special talent as a species is our ability to refashion raw materials–first rocks into tools, then, eventually, quartz into integrated circuits. We are, he suggests, Homo stuffensis, a creature 'defined and made by our things.' We should change our ways–we must change our ways–but this long history is against us."– "New Yorker"
