Klinger presented in 2015 a historical geography of rare earth elements from their discovery to the atomic age with a focus on the period between 1880 and 1960 in order to lend greater depth to the growing body of scholarship on the relationship between rare earth elements and global political change. Drawing on archival and field research undertaken in the United States, China, Brazil, and Germany between 2011 and 2014, this article advances the following argument. Rare earth elements, and the production of geological knowledge about them, have entangled with contentious politics since their first industrial applications in the late 19th century. The historical geography of rare earth exploration and extraction is defined by a fundamental tension between the military-industrial necessity of these elements and the hazards associated with their production. This tension played a definitive role in international colonial, Cold War, and atomic politics.
The elements and the separation techniques—which defined the tense decades of the mid-twentieth century prior to the rise of the US as the primary producer of rare earth elements from the 1960s to 2000. Following China’s first nuclear weapons test in 1964, central government leaders ordered a reorganization of the country’s research and development programs for rare earth and other non-ferrous metals. Xu Guangxian’s work on isolating uranium was crucial to his discovery of the Cascade Theory of Countercurrent Extraction, which revolutionized rare earth production and greatly increased the global rare earth supply in the 1970s. Until this point, China exported raw materials and imported separated and refined rare earths (Deng, 2009). Although the US dominated global production, Xu’s discovery marked the beginning of China’s technological superiority in the rare earth sector, which was recognized in the early 21st century (Fifarek et al., 2008).
The improvements in rare earth separation techniques in the 1960s and 1970s reduced the cost of europium, which enabled the mass production of red phosphors for color televisions. The color revolution in television signaled the beginning of the proliferation of rare earths into household life through consumer electronics. The acceleration of innovations in information technology enabled by the elements of the lanthanide series through the 1970s and 1980s conceptually decoupled rare earths from radioactive
elements such as uranium and thorium, which likewise shifted the politics of prospecting and production away from those characterizing the early nuclear age.
Applications in television and information technology in the mid-1960s piqued scientific interest in the physical, rather than chemical, properties of rare earth elements. It was their exceptional magnetic and conductive properties that enabled an impressive miniaturization of computing devices. Without rare earths, our computers would still be the size of a classroom instead of the size of a smartphone: global political, economic, social, and information networks would look very different if not for this crucial development. The petroleum industry took notice, and started using rare earths as petroleum cracking15 catalysts in 1964.
Over the course of the next decade, this drove annual domestic consumption in the US alone from 2000 to 10,000 tons annually. In the period between the atomic and the digital age, US government analysts stated that ‘if rare earths were to become unavailable, the effect on our present standard of living would not be catastrophic because, in most applications, the rare earths are merely replacing materials that are less effective for the particular purpose’ (Adams and Staatz, 1973, 548). But with the rise of digital
economies, the increasing importance of satellite communications to the daily functions of global political economy, security, and scientific progress, the situation has definitively changed. To wit: in 2013, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 761 (2013, 2), which declared the availability of rare earths to be ‘essential for economic growth, national security, technological innovation, and the manufacturing and agricultural supply chains.’ These changing political ideas about rare earths reflect the changing uses of rare earth elements over the past four decades. Because rare earth-enhanced technologies are essential to the hardware of modern life as we know it, their political significance differs now from the era examined in the body of this article: then, rare earths were crucial to small groups of highly specialized lighting, glassware, and weapons researchers and manufacturers. Now, rare earths matter for everybody.
Given the multifarious applications of rare earth elements, global consumption may seem relatively small by comparison: 120,148 tons in 2014 (Castilloux, 2014). This is because of the nature of most of their applications. Rare earths are added to other metals to make them stronger, lighter, or more conductive. They are described as ‘spice’ metals in Germany, as the ‘MSG of industry’ in China, and the ‘vitamins’ of modern industry in Japan (Zepf, 2013; Klinger, 2011; Koerth, 2012; Dent, 2012). Their relatively low annual consumption, their contemporary importance, and their fairly common geological incidence illustrates the fact that rare earth politics are driven by structural, rather than actual, scarcity.
This article has presented a broad historical geography of rare earth elements between 1880 and 1960 with an emphasis on the political economic contexts in which sites of extraction were sought, identified, and opened. While rare earths are neither rare nor overwhelmingly concentrated in any single country, their strategic necessity coupled with their geological coincidence with radioactive materials generated contentious politics as imperial,national and Cold War regimes dealt with the conflicting
imperatives to secure these resources while sequestering the harmful effects of their production. This dynamic continues to characterize the international geography of rare earth prospecting and mining. In order to mitigate the devastating environmental harm wrought by rare earth production in China, the central government resolved to change the country’s position in the global division of labor by becoming a net importer (Chen, 2011), while the recently revived mine in Mountain Pass, California continues to sub-contract portions of the beneficiation processes to places with more lax environmental and labor laws (Molycorp, 2012).
Meanwhile, the contemporary race to identify and exploit new rare earth reserves in remote places such as Greenland, Afghanistan, and the Pacific sea bed has challenged environmental conventions from local to international scales as states and firms struggle to isolate production from centers of accountability while simultaneously hoping to capture the perceived geopolitical capital generated by controlling a portion of the global rare earth supply. Geology, as a science of territoriality, laid the foundation on which these historical dramas unfolded, and remains operative today in the dynamic geographies and politics of rare earth elements.
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