Klinger Presents Rare Earth Frontiers at GDP Center
Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, gave a February 21, 2018 talk at the Global Development Policy (GDP) Center, an affiliated center of the Pardee School, on her new book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Cornell University Press, 2018).
Klinger spoke as part of the GDP Center’s China Global Research Colloquium, and discussed the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths.
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. According to Klinger, the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global.
In the book, Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places.
Klinger 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 including 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, Klinger examines the production of the rare earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation.
Julie Klinger specializes in development, environment, and security politics in Latin America and China in comparative and global perspective. She is currently completing a book project on the global geography of rare earth prospecting and mining, with a special emphasis on the development and geopolitics of resource frontiers in Brazil, China, and Outer Space.