Rare Earth Frontiers
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. 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.
Praise for Rare Earth Frontiers
"Rare Earth Frontiers is a timely text. As Klinger notes, rare earths are neither rare nor technically earths, but they are still widely believed to be both. Although her approach focuses on the human, or cultural, geography of rare earths mining, she does not ignore the geological occurrence of these mineral types, both on earth and on the moon. This volume is excellently organized, insightfully written, and extensively sourced."
― Choice
"Rare Earth Frontiers could easily become the go-to reference for policymakers concerned with the global politics of rare earths. I could envision this book being adopted in courses offered in the disciplines of material science, political science, economics, political anthropology, geography, and sociology. I very much became engrossed in the fieldwork stories, which helped to put a human facecon this topic."
― Ryan Kiggins, co-editor of The Political Economy of Rare Earth Elements