They've done so because of the current imperatives of the market: with the price of raw materials skyrocketing in the face of China rapid industrialization and economic growth in the affluent world flat-lining, companies have ample new markets but no real pricing power.
The world is not only a material place, but in the face of extreme physical vulnerability (or a simple headache), one comprehends anew the undeniable reality that mind, body, and spirit are inseparable.
For example, Ernst and Pittler suggest that it is the use of "highly diluted material that overtly flies in the face of science and has caused homeopathy to be regarded as placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst" [ 10].
For years, John Joseph Earley of Washington, DC, had used materials that seemed durable in the face of elements such as the weather and urban soot and grime.
We conclude that chrysotile asbestos is intrinsically more hazardous than p-aramid, PVA, or cellulose fibers and that its continued use in asbestos-cement products and friction materials is not justifiable in the face of available technically adequate substitutes.
But when more modern transport and modern lightweight materials changed the face of travel in the 20th century, its business languished until 2009, when the luxury goods group LVMH, scenting a change in the wind, acquired the label, opening a new Moynat store in 2011 on the elegant rue Saint Honoré.
The romance of honor and glory may have died on the Western Front, but the romance of romance, and of sex and the material life in particular, was relighted; in the face of annihilation, postponing pleasure just looked silly.
They have outsourced social responsibility to journalists, watchdogs and other citizens, who have increasingly taken on the role of unpaid moderators – flagging abusive, dangerous and illegal material, which the sites then remove in the face of bad publicity.
And in plays such as Peter Nichols's The National Health, David Storey's The Contractor, Alan Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business and Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party you find potent metaphors for a nation still plagued by class and ill at ease with itself in the face of material advancement.
