Rare Earth Frontiers

Abstract

To those whose love and hospitality provided a warm respite amid the more intense periods of fieldwork, thank you. To Ward Lynds and Zhang Yazhou, my dear friends of fifteen years in Changchun. To Brendan and Angela Acord in Beijing, my beloved bon vivants. To Jeffrey Warner, Yang Weina, and Zhao Qiuwan in Shanghai. To Gustavo Oliveira in Brasília, and to my dear Brazilian family, whom I had the good fortune of encountering in both Brazil and China. our long conversations, cele brations, and laughter sustain me. Renato, Dulcinea, Daniela, Guilherme, Kika, Manuela, Anahi, and most of all, José Renato Peneluppi Jr. To my intellectual godparents, mentors, and dear friends, Joshua Muldavin and Monica Varsanyi. Thank you for lighting my way and sharing so much of your lives with me, from Beijing to New York City.To my family, thank you for your love, encouragement, and zest for adventure. As long as I can remember, you've told me to go far, be brave, have fun, and do the right thing. I will always do my best to make you proud.To my dear spouse, life partner, and best friend, Nick Bojda. Thank you for every single conversation, for circling the globe with me, and for not only enduring long absences but cheering me through them. Your love and support mean the world to me.Portions of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in earlier form in "Historical Geography of Rare Earth Ele ments. From Discovery to the Atomic Age," The Extractive Industries and Society 2, no. 3 ( 2015): 572-80. Portions of chapters 1 and 3 are reprinted from "The Environment-Security Nexus in Con temporary Rare Earth Politics," in The Po liti cal Economy of Rare Earth Ele ments. Rising Powers and Technological Change, edited by Ryan David Kiggins (New York: Macmillan, 2015), 133-55. Thank you for supporting my scholarly work.Fi nally, I am im mensely grateful for the support provided by my editor, Jim Lance, and the publishing team at Cornell University Press. Thank you for your stewardship over this proj ect.All translations in the text are my own, as are any remaining errors or shortcomings. Except where indicated in the text, this book uses metric mea surements. Large volumes are mea sured in tonnes, the singular of which is a unit of mass equal to 1,000 kilograms. These are not to be confused with the American ton, which is a unit of mass equal to 907.2 kilograms, or 2,000 pounds.

Explaining the emergence of land-use frontiers

“…Much of the literature and reasoning exposed in the previous and following sections have been initially formulated with a focus on deforestation and agricultural frontiers. Yet, similar frontier trajectories have been described for other land uses, such as timber [40,41], including waves of successive logging of trees of different qualities in natural forests [42], or for frontiers driven by extractivist or energy activities such as mining [43], oil and gas exploitation [44], hydropower construction [45] or the expansion of solar and wind power [46].…”

Geographies of science and technology II: In the critical zone

“…An ever-growing area of geographical literature has productively brought together critical studies of technoscience with that of infrastructure, natural resources and political ecology (Barry, 2013; Bosworth, 2018; Klinger, 2017). Recent work has examined technologies and infrastructures like waste incinerators, bioenergy and wind energy as spatiotemporal or socioecological fixes for emerging crises of capital accumulation, within the context of changing regimes of environmental regulation and energy production.…”

Geographies of outer space: Progress and new opportunities

“…In this way, outer space is framed as the ultimate sacrifice zone. Not only is it thought of as an uninhabited immensity that can be used and polluted as much as humanly possible, the fact that it is infinite is taken to mean that human activities will not have any meaningful consequences (Klinger, 2017).…”