Speaker – Julie Klinger, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, UW-Madison
Space exploration, energy generation, warfare, disaster recovery: these activities rely on technologies and infrastructures positioned on Earth or in space. Hardware is comprised of minerals, metals, and materials—many now designated as ‘critical’ by national governments—that first must be wrested from the Earth and fed into supply chains in which human labor and their automated proxies transform rocks into tech. It would seem, then, that nearly all solutions to large-scale problems rest on an extractive imperative. Yet the extractive imperative exacerbates many of the same problems it is invoked to solve: displacement, insecurity, geopolitical competition, and human suffering. This apparent dilemma—between the promise of better futures and the seemingly unavoidable violence required to build them—shapes political, economic, and cultural imaginations in terms of what kinds of futures are possible on Earth and in Space, and therefore what kinds of legal and physical infrastructures are needed for their realization. Based on fieldwork in mining, energy, policy, and space development on four continents, this talk investigates how this dilemma plays out across many different places through common but often conflicting needs for critical minerals. What are the potential futures envisioned by these conflicting critical mineral regimes? More fundamentally: what, and whom, is considered worth saving in the race for critical minerals below the ground and in the heavens?