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Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes
" 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 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. 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, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon.
340 pages, Paperback
Published January 15, 2018
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August 10, 2025
Julie Michelle Klinger's Rare Earth Frontiers is a deeply researched intervention into the geography and geopolitics of rare earth elements (REEs). Through a global survey of sites, from China’s Inner Mongolia to Brazil’s Amazon, from Greenland to Afghanistan, and even to the Moon, Klinger challenges the dominant narratives of scarcity and monopoly that have shaped how REEs are imagined and pursued. With depth, she interrogates how REEs became entangled with national security agendas, state-building logics, imperial ambitions, and greenwashing logics.
One of the book’s central claims is that rare earth scarcity is not a geological fact but a geopolitical fiction (that sometimes serves undemocratic economic policies). This fiction, she argues, emerged strongly after the 2010 crisis, when China temporarily cut exports of REEs, triggering panic in Euro-American political and industrial circles. But Klinger situates this moment in a longer history of Cold War geopolitics, mining frontiers, and the production of global commodity chains that obscure the material and social costs of extraction. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and deep archival research, she illustrates how the REE boom has provided a justification for the further enclosure of "frontiers", be they territorial, legal, or planetary. In this sense, it reminded me of Arboleda's Planetary Mine.
What I found fascinating is how Klinger complicates the notion of state expertise. She reveals that in countries like China and Brazil, state geological knowledge is not developed in isolation, but coexists with, and draws from, local vernacular knowledge held by artisanal and black-market miners. These actors, working outside formal scientific or legal frameworks, possess intimate, place-based understanding of terrain, mineral deposits, and extraction methods. Their knowledge is not marginal but foundational to shaping how geological data is collected and interpreted.
This challenges the idea of geological surveys as objective, technocratic tools. Instead, Klinger shows that geological knowledge is political. It is used to legitimise competing territorial claims and extractive agendas. It’s a powerful reminder that “expertise” is often entangled with informal, subaltern, and contested sources of knowledge, especially in resource frontiers.
Geography, for Klinger, is not just a backdrop for the REE story, as she writes: “Rather than attempt to squeeze the local and global complexities of the questions at hand into a set of "impacts" and "outcomes," geography embraces the material and meaningful complexity characterizing a given issue, and examines the unfolding relationship between humans and the environment as a dialectic.” This dialectical approach is visible throughout the book, where local struggles over land and identity are always placed in relation to broader state, corporate, and geopolitical interests.
Baotou, (in Inner Mongolia) is the global hub of rare earth processing. While the city symbolises China’s dominance over REE production, Klinger reveals how this dominance isn't just a product of state conspiracy, but more of a convergence of logistical, infrastructural, and economic factors, enabled, ironically, by outsourcing decisions made by Western industries themselves. The environmental toll on Baotou’s population is significant, with toxic waste lakes and radiation levels largely unregulated (she mentions something awful called "Long Tooth Disease" which is like severe gum recession, as well as cancers).
Klinger challenges the common framing of China’s REE monopoly as a geopolitical threat. Instead, she shows how this narrative was retroactively applied to a process already underway. The 2010 “crisis” was less a deliberate act of aggression than the outcome of years of supply chain consolidation and Western disinvestment. Moreover, international responses, especially from the U.S. often served to reinforce China’s position by externalising the dirty aspects of production rather than creating greener alternatives. Klinger demonstrates how the monopoly panic obscured deeper patterns of complicity and distraction from environmental reform.
In the aftermath of the 2010 crisis, numerous countries, including Greenland, Afghanistan, and the U.S. sought to reposition themselves as alternative REE suppliers. Klinger explores how these efforts were less about genuine supply diversification and more about using REE extraction to extend sovereignty over historically unruly or autonomous territories. In Greenland, REEs were linked to the project of independence from Denmark; in Afghanistan, to state rationalisation and foreign occupation; and in the U.S., to fantasies of green nationalism that failed under closer inspection (e.g., the failed revival of the Mountain Pass mine). These case studies reveal how rare earth frontiers have become instruments of both political control and environmental degradation.
Brazil emerges in Klinger’s narrative as a place of uncelebrated breakthroughs. Brazilian scientists developed promising technologies for cleaner REE production using waste materials from niobium mining. However, these efforts were largely ignored by industry actors, who continued to favour cheaper and dirtier sources, especially from China. The Brazilian case underscores the structural barriers to green innovation, not because such alternatives don’t exist, but because they are economically and politically marginalised in a system that prioritises short-term profit and strategic control.
In one of the book’s most provocative chapters, Klinger turns to the Moon as the final REE frontier. Although no one is actively mining there, post-2010 scarcity narratives have been instrumental in legitimising off-Earth mining proposals. Klinger argues that lunar mining is not primarily about resource access, but about asserting geopolitical control over space. Much like other frontiers in the Amazon or Afghanistan, the Moon represents a site where power, futurism, and enclosure converge, despite the availability of terrestrial solutions like recycling. Lunar mining, she suggests, is ultimately more about consolidating hegemonic influence than meeting material needs.
Rare Earth Frontiers is an in-depth interdisciplinary work that unsettles easy binaries between East and West, green and dirty, local and global. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in political ecology, global development, or the hidden geographies of the digital age. By exposing the fictions underpinning the REE economy and offering grounded alternatives, Klinger invites readers to imagine new forms of accountability, cooperation, and care in the face of extractive capitalism.
One of the book’s central claims is that rare earth scarcity is not a geological fact but a geopolitical fiction (that sometimes serves undemocratic economic policies). This fiction, she argues, emerged strongly after the 2010 crisis, when China temporarily cut exports of REEs, triggering panic in Euro-American political and industrial circles. But Klinger situates this moment in a longer history of Cold War geopolitics, mining frontiers, and the production of global commodity chains that obscure the material and social costs of extraction. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and deep archival research, she illustrates how the REE boom has provided a justification for the further enclosure of "frontiers", be they territorial, legal, or planetary. In this sense, it reminded me of Arboleda's Planetary Mine.
What I found fascinating is how Klinger complicates the notion of state expertise. She reveals that in countries like China and Brazil, state geological knowledge is not developed in isolation, but coexists with, and draws from, local vernacular knowledge held by artisanal and black-market miners. These actors, working outside formal scientific or legal frameworks, possess intimate, place-based understanding of terrain, mineral deposits, and extraction methods. Their knowledge is not marginal but foundational to shaping how geological data is collected and interpreted.
This challenges the idea of geological surveys as objective, technocratic tools. Instead, Klinger shows that geological knowledge is political. It is used to legitimise competing territorial claims and extractive agendas. It’s a powerful reminder that “expertise” is often entangled with informal, subaltern, and contested sources of knowledge, especially in resource frontiers.
Geography, for Klinger, is not just a backdrop for the REE story, as she writes: “Rather than attempt to squeeze the local and global complexities of the questions at hand into a set of "impacts" and "outcomes," geography embraces the material and meaningful complexity characterizing a given issue, and examines the unfolding relationship between humans and the environment as a dialectic.” This dialectical approach is visible throughout the book, where local struggles over land and identity are always placed in relation to broader state, corporate, and geopolitical interests.
Baotou, (in Inner Mongolia) is the global hub of rare earth processing. While the city symbolises China’s dominance over REE production, Klinger reveals how this dominance isn't just a product of state conspiracy, but more of a convergence of logistical, infrastructural, and economic factors, enabled, ironically, by outsourcing decisions made by Western industries themselves. The environmental toll on Baotou’s population is significant, with toxic waste lakes and radiation levels largely unregulated (she mentions something awful called "Long Tooth Disease" which is like severe gum recession, as well as cancers).
Klinger challenges the common framing of China’s REE monopoly as a geopolitical threat. Instead, she shows how this narrative was retroactively applied to a process already underway. The 2010 “crisis” was less a deliberate act of aggression than the outcome of years of supply chain consolidation and Western disinvestment. Moreover, international responses, especially from the U.S. often served to reinforce China’s position by externalising the dirty aspects of production rather than creating greener alternatives. Klinger demonstrates how the monopoly panic obscured deeper patterns of complicity and distraction from environmental reform.
In the aftermath of the 2010 crisis, numerous countries, including Greenland, Afghanistan, and the U.S. sought to reposition themselves as alternative REE suppliers. Klinger explores how these efforts were less about genuine supply diversification and more about using REE extraction to extend sovereignty over historically unruly or autonomous territories. In Greenland, REEs were linked to the project of independence from Denmark; in Afghanistan, to state rationalisation and foreign occupation; and in the U.S., to fantasies of green nationalism that failed under closer inspection (e.g., the failed revival of the Mountain Pass mine). These case studies reveal how rare earth frontiers have become instruments of both political control and environmental degradation.
Brazil emerges in Klinger’s narrative as a place of uncelebrated breakthroughs. Brazilian scientists developed promising technologies for cleaner REE production using waste materials from niobium mining. However, these efforts were largely ignored by industry actors, who continued to favour cheaper and dirtier sources, especially from China. The Brazilian case underscores the structural barriers to green innovation, not because such alternatives don’t exist, but because they are economically and politically marginalised in a system that prioritises short-term profit and strategic control.
In one of the book’s most provocative chapters, Klinger turns to the Moon as the final REE frontier. Although no one is actively mining there, post-2010 scarcity narratives have been instrumental in legitimising off-Earth mining proposals. Klinger argues that lunar mining is not primarily about resource access, but about asserting geopolitical control over space. Much like other frontiers in the Amazon or Afghanistan, the Moon represents a site where power, futurism, and enclosure converge, despite the availability of terrestrial solutions like recycling. Lunar mining, she suggests, is ultimately more about consolidating hegemonic influence than meeting material needs.
Rare Earth Frontiers is an in-depth interdisciplinary work that unsettles easy binaries between East and West, green and dirty, local and global. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in political ecology, global development, or the hidden geographies of the digital age. By exposing the fictions underpinning the REE economy and offering grounded alternatives, Klinger invites readers to imagine new forms of accountability, cooperation, and care in the face of extractive capitalism.
November 13, 2019
This book is essential reading if you want to understand the geography of rare earth extraction (and I would argue, toxic labour in general) and its role in modern manufacturing. Impressive scholarship investigating three case studies (Baotou in China, Brazilian northwestern Amazon and the Moon) representing respectively the established, explored and prospective mining site. This study is the result of Klinger's years of on-the-ground work as well as both anglophone, lusophone and sinophone archives and interviewees.
Some popular myths and tropes were shattered, let's put ut that way
Some popular myths and tropes were shattered, let's put ut that way
October 25, 2020
Very comprehensive - the author successfully weaves macro-perspective research with personally-gained telling anecdotes from the remote Brazilian Amazon and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. She does repeat herself more than necessary, but does a great job of dispelling rare earth myths. It is not an easy read, but done in a way that is relatable enough to be understood by those outside academia.
April 24, 2021
This is a tough-to-review book for me, because while the actual information presented in it is quite good, the style is not at all to my taste. The idea that rare earth mining locations are dictated by more than pure economic viability of a mine is not exactly super revelatory, but the author makes a comprehensive case that political, military, and expansionist reasons are also extremely important reasons for the present and likely future rare earth mining locations. It also has good explanations of the non-rarity of rare earths, how they formed in the Earth's crust, a history of mining rare earths, and a summary of possible rare earth mining locations.
What subtracts from the book for me is the extremely academic prose, and the repetitiveness of some of the arguments. You have many passages like (pp. 13-14) "The frontier is also used literally to refer to a place, whether the place is an ambiguous zone or a Cartesian line. Such places are also ideations, but they are ideations to which people give meaning through enforcement mechanisms in specific places. A frontier always refers to a real and imagined place ... These dialectical characteristics of the frontier-literal an figurative, real and imagined, material and meaningful-are co-constituted with the exercise of state and corporate power."
If you enjoy reading this type of prose, then the book will certainly be more appetizing than it is for me. I do wonder if the academic prose contributes to repeating points (the one good thing about it is that unclear points become clearer when they are rewritten in slightly different ways multiple times).
My other critique is that the moon really does not fit into the author's thesis as neatly as presented, and the book's argument would be stronger if it straightforwardly acknowledged this. The idea of the moon as a frontier/border for countries to show off power and gain resources is well-taken, but when the argument is (p.200) "Frontiers are seldom as empty as aspiring conquerors would claim. Where frontiers are not populated with people, they are imbued with collectively held meanings" you know the argument is perhaps not so straightforward and is getting a bit too abstract. As I am not knowledgeable about space law, I don't know about Klinger's interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty, but am not convinced by the book's arguments (the author's argument that the Moon Treaty is "international law" is a bit suspect even from just reading the Wikipedia page; it also seems unlikely to me that a treaty ratified by 5 countries [and I don't believe any permanent members of the UN] could be legally binding internationally). The arguments about the necessity and consequences of mining the moon are well laid-out, if clearly biased in favor of international over private/corporate exploration.
Thus, overall, I can't say I'd recommend the book. I think if you simply know that rare earths are not rare, but that processing rare earths is difficult [China has a lot invested in their project besides selling rare earths which enables them to retain a de facto monopoly], you'll come away with the main takeaway. The history is covered well with the author clearly telling and showing certain biases (neo-liberalism is often implied to have mostly bad consequences, for example). This opinionated writing isn't actually all that bad, since Klinger is upfront about where the story came from and what stance it is being told from. Still, there were too many times I wish the author had not used "academicese" rather than more straightforward prose to call it enjoyable to read.
What subtracts from the book for me is the extremely academic prose, and the repetitiveness of some of the arguments. You have many passages like (pp. 13-14) "The frontier is also used literally to refer to a place, whether the place is an ambiguous zone or a Cartesian line. Such places are also ideations, but they are ideations to which people give meaning through enforcement mechanisms in specific places. A frontier always refers to a real and imagined place ... These dialectical characteristics of the frontier-literal an figurative, real and imagined, material and meaningful-are co-constituted with the exercise of state and corporate power."
If you enjoy reading this type of prose, then the book will certainly be more appetizing than it is for me. I do wonder if the academic prose contributes to repeating points (the one good thing about it is that unclear points become clearer when they are rewritten in slightly different ways multiple times).
My other critique is that the moon really does not fit into the author's thesis as neatly as presented, and the book's argument would be stronger if it straightforwardly acknowledged this. The idea of the moon as a frontier/border for countries to show off power and gain resources is well-taken, but when the argument is (p.200) "Frontiers are seldom as empty as aspiring conquerors would claim. Where frontiers are not populated with people, they are imbued with collectively held meanings" you know the argument is perhaps not so straightforward and is getting a bit too abstract. As I am not knowledgeable about space law, I don't know about Klinger's interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty, but am not convinced by the book's arguments (the author's argument that the Moon Treaty is "international law" is a bit suspect even from just reading the Wikipedia page; it also seems unlikely to me that a treaty ratified by 5 countries [and I don't believe any permanent members of the UN] could be legally binding internationally). The arguments about the necessity and consequences of mining the moon are well laid-out, if clearly biased in favor of international over private/corporate exploration.
Thus, overall, I can't say I'd recommend the book. I think if you simply know that rare earths are not rare, but that processing rare earths is difficult [China has a lot invested in their project besides selling rare earths which enables them to retain a de facto monopoly], you'll come away with the main takeaway. The history is covered well with the author clearly telling and showing certain biases (neo-liberalism is often implied to have mostly bad consequences, for example). This opinionated writing isn't actually all that bad, since Klinger is upfront about where the story came from and what stance it is being told from. Still, there were too many times I wish the author had not used "academicese" rather than more straightforward prose to call it enjoyable to read.
June 28, 2023
This is a very important and relevant topic, and the writer is clearly intelligent and incredibly knowledgeable about the subject. The book is well-researched and educational.
Sadly I don't think it is appropriate as a "popular" science book and should not be seen outside of a specialist journal - in its current form. It is dripping in intellectualism, with academic jargon pockmarking the text like craters on the (potentially mineable) Moon. There is some cadence that is suddenly disrupted by sesquipedalian adventures, and the constant referencing in-text is disturbing when a simple footnote or numerical reference would do.
Taking time to rewrite this as a "popular" book for the layman who doesn't have much knowledge of the topic would certainly unlock the potential of what could be, in my view, a rather revolutionary piece of work that would open a lot of eyes to the somewhat mysterious, well-worth-telling story of rare earths.
Sadly I don't think it is appropriate as a "popular" science book and should not be seen outside of a specialist journal - in its current form. It is dripping in intellectualism, with academic jargon pockmarking the text like craters on the (potentially mineable) Moon. There is some cadence that is suddenly disrupted by sesquipedalian adventures, and the constant referencing in-text is disturbing when a simple footnote or numerical reference would do.
Taking time to rewrite this as a "popular" book for the layman who doesn't have much knowledge of the topic would certainly unlock the potential of what could be, in my view, a rather revolutionary piece of work that would open a lot of eyes to the somewhat mysterious, well-worth-telling story of rare earths.
March 10, 2022
What a comprehensive approach toward examining the geopolitical, economic and historical exigencies of this incredible set of extractable resources! Klinger's side-by-side examination of China's operable mines, Brazil's quandary of establishing adequate consensus in order to enact mining, and the push for privatisation of the Moon's global patrimony portrays a highly complex and powerful critique of the circumstances surrounding how rare earth frontiers are best governed. Erudite and thoroughly researched, this work provides a clear explication of the promise and peril of this increasingly important area of resource development.
5 stars. I learned a ton. Recommended for those who are interested in developing a deeper understanding of rare earth minerals and the challenges we face as we continue to incorporate them into the global economy. Revelatory.
5 stars. I learned a ton. Recommended for those who are interested in developing a deeper understanding of rare earth minerals and the challenges we face as we continue to incorporate them into the global economy. Revelatory.
September 15, 2022
Coming in with little knowledge of the matter, this was an informative, if sometimes heavy-going, read. A paragraph here and there sometimes needed a second read because of the dense writing, but that is perhaps on me. However, the writing was also repetitive in many places and could stand greatly to benefit from an editor more willing to cut sentences when they repeat the same point for the fifth time.
March 31, 2019
Interesting book that really does a good job framing the politics around Rare Earth Element extraction in a way that is clear and logical.
August 9, 2023
Get mama some Niobium!
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