Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves
to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the
miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical
technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems.
Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare
earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this
means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger
excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of
the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places.
Klinger writes about
the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the
exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how
scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical
campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces
that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power.
These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in the
Amazon, Greenland, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon. Drawing on
ethnographic, archival, and interview data gathered in local
languages and offering possible solutions to the problems it
documents, this book examines the production of the rare earth
frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation,
sacrifice, and transformation.