Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes

By: Julie Michelle Klinger

Narrated by: Steve Rausch

Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

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, 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 audiobook examines the production of the rare-earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation.

©2017 Cornell University (P)2018 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Could easily become the go-to reference for policymakers concerned with the global politics of rare earths." (Ryan Kiggins, coeditor of The Political Economy of Rare Earth Elements)

Breaks ground and really informative

People working in space mining or rare earth research or news have probably already heard of this book, it's even being used in some college courses now and it also won the Meridian award (a top award amongst geographers). Since rare earths have been such a hot topic in the last several years, this book has been important because it explains whats going on without trying to hype anything up. I've read several chapters and happy they made an audio book so now I'm going to listen to the other chapters. Only downside to the audio book is that there are some important figures you won't be able to 'hear', but the narrator has a decent voice for this kind of material.

This is not about rare earth's

The book is about geopolitics. rare earths are popular. There is nothing useful regarding uses, economics, distribution of, cost of extraction, space or anything scientist or investors or marketers or entrepreneurs can use. The author considers all these facile occupations. The book IMO was written to sell & make monery,. The research required for the book would take ten minutes and then just a bunch of dated opinion. I will admit, I only made it through 3 chapters before writing this. Too many fake books out there these days.