Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes

"Henrik: The thing about rare earth metals is that they are neither rare nor earth. Here we are, back at that very small place in Sweden, Ytterby, because when the first of these metals was discovered, it was just assumed, since no one had discovered it before, it had to be rare. We now know that it’s actually fairly abundant, but this moniker of ‘rare’ has stuck. Currently, there are 17 chemically similar elements that are in this rare earth category. The first one was discovered in Ytterby in the late 1700s. This was 230 plus years ago, which is very different from mercury that has been known about and used for millennia. And even if some of these rare earth metals were used before, they have only entered the arena of big business over the last couple of decades, because of the technological revolution with computers and cell phones and satellites and batteries for electric cars. This is where the rare earth metals have become economically valuable and integral to modern society. Noelle: One of the things that Klinger says in the book is that their applications “mirror the best and worst of the world we’re building.” You have all of these technological applications, renewable energies, for example. But also uses in explosives and weapons and other kinds of military applications. Noelle: A good example is neodymium. It’s used in a lot of the consumer electronics technologies. So hard drives and also renewable energies, like wind turbines, solar panels, but also in missiles and drones. It’s used a lot in magnets. There’s a great table in the book of what the rare earths are and what they’re used for. Henrik: One of the things I like very much in this book is that it’s based on extensive field research. Klinger looks at one established site for mining rare earth metals, one explored site where the large-scale production has not yet started, and one prospective site. The established site is in Inner Mongolia, part of China. She traveled and did research there. The explored site is in the Brazilian Amazon. She also traveled there and looked at potential mining on indigenous lands in the Amazon. “Ytterby…is a very, very small place in Sweden where they have discovered more elements than in any other place in the world” Her prospective site is on the Moon and clearly she did not travel there. But she frames her book in the context of a frontier: what is a frontier? As a human geographer, Klinger thinks of frontiers in a temporal sense—frontiers are moved over time—as well as in a spatial sense as frontiers are moved into “new” places, but she also looks at cultural, political, and scientific dimensions of frontiers. She talks about how this notion of frontiers in mining for rare earth metals is very intimately tied into issues of imperialism and colonialism and oppression and nationalism. It’s a really interesting book for people who are not just interested in the rare earth metals, but also resource extraction more broadly. Who benefits from resource extraction? Who is harmed by resource extraction? Who has power? Who doesn’t have power? Noelle: They can be toxic, particularly at high levels. It depends on the substance, there are a lot of different ones. They’re not used in high quantities in products, but certainly the environmental impact in these mining areas and digging up a lot of elements can be toxic. One of the truisms in toxicology is the dose makes the poison. That comes from the work of Paracelsus, who worked with mercury. How much you’re exposed also determines the impact. In a lot of these cases, though, the highest exposures in these areas are to well-known dangerous substances that are co-occurring with some of these rare earth metals. Henrik: Right, because in places where these rare earth deposits are high enough in concentration that they’re actually mineable, it often coincides with other hazardous elements—like uranium and thorium, arsenic and fluoride and other heavy metals. So, as you extract these rare earth metals, you’re unearthing a lot of these other toxic substances too. Then that mining waste is often just tossed to the side. Local communities and local people can suffer from severe poisoning not from the rare earth metal necessarily, but all the other hazardous substances that are dug up at the same time. Noelle: Right. And I think that’s where rare earth mining has a lot of parallels with mercury. One of the really important challenges in mercury and sustainability today is that it’s still used in artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Industrial mining has moved on and uses different technologies to mine gold, but artisanal and small-scale gold miners still use mercury. Klinger talks a lot about the differentiation between artisanal mining and industrial mining in these different frontier areas, how it’s looked at in society and done by different groups, how it’s regulated. One of the challenges with artisanal mining is it’s often an important part of livelihoods in regions where people don’t have a lot of other options. This is something international efforts to control mercury have been dealing with, to try to figure out what to do about sustainable livelihoods in places which are heavily dominated by mining. In her fieldwork, Klinger goes to communities which are involved in rare earth mining and engages different actors—in particular, in the case of Brazil, how indigenous peoples and miners are interacting in some of these frontier regions."