Constructing the global sand crisis: Four reasons to interrogate crisis and scarcity in narrating extraction

•In this viewpoint, I outline the sand crisis as it has been presented and raise four concerns about what the crisis framing accomplishes. This includes:•The unintended effects of urgency: time as a limited resource.•The unintended effects of urgency: limited time as a limit to who can act.•Scarcity is political: who defines scarcity and how impacts who is involved and what solutions are possible.•Crisis simplifies complexity and can overlook people and relationships that might matter.