Desert Drone Mapping the Rare Earth Frontier in Western Australia

Desert Drone. Mapping the Rare Earth Frontier in Western Australia

Desert, and Mount Weld in the Goldfields. Most people are probably oblivious to these locales, but the minerals that are mined here are used in everything from mobile phones to hybrid car batteries, flat-screens, guided missile systems, and wind turbines. In short, rare earth elements enable all our hardware and software, making it lighter, faster, stronger, and longer lasting. Without these minerals just about everything would come to a standstill.
Contrary to popular belief, rare earths are not rare. But why then are the minerals mined in only a few far-off places around the world? One of the world's foremost experts on global rare earth geography, Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger, argues that we cannot begin to understand the rare earth situation without critically examining the sorts of spaces in which rare earths are mined. According to Klinger, the spaces of rare earth extraction are often cast as frontiers "imagined as empty of (indispensable) people yet full of the particular variety of riches fancied by extralocal actors" (Klinger 2017, 13). The rare earth frontier, Klinger explains, "is found in borderlands and hinterlands, in places where local landscapes and lives are deemed sacrificable in the name of some greater good" (Klinger 2017, 11). Evidently, another key feature of rare earth mining is social and environmental destruction.

From the Gobi Desert to the Goldfields
The research presented in this article is based on fieldwork at Mount Weld, but my preoccupation with rare earth extraction initially began elsewhere. In 2016, I travelled to Baotou, also known as the rare earth capital of the world, to document the infamous tailings dam Weikuang (Danielewitz et al. 2016 The steppe of Inner Mongolia has been a rare earth frontier for decades. As Klinger points out, "its history of bordermarking and resource extraction has been 'written in blood'" (Klinger 2017, 14). But as rare earth minerals have taken centre stage in the escalating trade war between the US and China, the geopolitical landscape is changing and thus the toxic waste of rare earth production is flowing-and returning-to other parts of the Global South. In 2010-11, a Chinese embargo caused an explosion and subsequent meltdown in prices on rare earth elements.
At the time, more than 90% of the global consumption of rare earths was produced in China. Beijing argued that the move to cut exports had to do with domestic environmental concerns, but the blocking of shipments conspicuously followed a territorial dispute with Japan. Whatever the reasons, the embargo created the perfect conditions for rival producers to enter the global market. In by professor of sociology Stephan Lessenich as "externalization societies." Lessenich argues that the Global North systematically transfers the consequences of its excessive consumption to other world regions, that is, the poorer countries in the Global South: "Rare earths in, surplus waste out-thus runs the import-export strategy of the externalization society" (Lessenich 2019, 68).
Before Lynas began to operate in Malaysia, the country already had a history of radioactive contamination caused by rare earth processing. Through the 1980s, a processing plant, partly owned by Mitsubishi, was dumping thorium in an open waste facility close to the village of Bukit Merah, which led to a health disaster with reported cases of leukemia and birth defects. The plant was closed in 1992 but it took almost another 20 years before a clean-up was effectuated.
When it was revealed that Lynas had been granted a new license to refine rare earth oxides, it triggered Malaysia's largest environmental campaign ever: the "Save Malaysia, Stop Lynas" petition. The campaign gathered more than a million signatures. But that didn't stop Lynas. Despite massive protest, the company has been piling up thousands of tons of radioactive residue in a repository on the outskirts of Kuantan.
Professor in environmental studies Rob Nixon uses the term "slow violence" to describe the socioenvironmental impact of e.g. climate change, toxic drift, and deforestation. Slow violence takes place gradually and often invisibly. Consequently, a major challenge according to Nixon is how to represent it: "How to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects?" (Nixon 2011, 3). As an artist working across a range of media and formats in different geographical and cultural contexts, I have been grappling with questions of representation for a long time, but to confront slow violence poses a particularly difficult challenge. It requires, as Rob Nixon points out, "that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across time and space" (Nixon 2011, 10).

The road to Mount Weld
In the weeks prior to my arrival, it had proven difficult to find someone in Leonora were trying to locate are contained in the technologies we were trying to locate it with. The rare earth frontier is "out there," but it transcends local geographies and extends into our technologies. As professor and new media theorist Jussi Parikka writes, "media history conflates with earth history; the geological materials of metals and chemicals get deterritorialized from their strata and reterritorialized in machines that define our technical media culture" (Parikka 2015, 35).

The map and territory revisited
"The map is not the territory" is a well known expression coined by scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski in 1931. 5 However, in the age of digital mapping the relation between map and territory-this particular territory-becomes entangled in such an intricate way that we must reconsider the relation.

Fieldwork between artistic research and activism
The sacrifice zones of rare earth production are located in specific geographies threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are people whose quality of life-and often whose very existence-is of indifferent interest to the corporate media" (Nixon 2011, 16).
Visual artists working in vulnerable geographies may also play a mediating role in making unseen and imperceptible forms of slow violence visible and indeed tangible. And even more so, I would argue, when it comes to the socioenvironmental impact of the production of tech minerals such as rare earths.
As an artist working primarily with mineral-based image technologies in territories of mineral extraction, my intention is thus not only to document the wasted landscapes, but also to investigate the inextricable intertwinement of technology and geology, map and territory, image and materiality. Rare earth Desert Drone. Mapping the Rare Earth Frontier in Western Australia frontiers are located in specific geographies that can be mapped, but the truth is that it is almost impossible for end consumers of digital devices to escape some form of-more or less oblivious-complicity in the market-driven supply chains of raw materials. Even social enterprises such as Fairphone, which has done a great deal of research to map unethical suppliers of minerals, admit to having enormous difficulties with tracking the labyrinthine global network of supply chains behind our tech. An artistic approach might not overthrow unjust policies anytime soon, but it has a powerful potential to engender a more profound visual apprehension of the complex entanglement between technologies and ecologies, and the devastating social and environmental repercussions of the current modes of extraction and production.
Notes 1 MP Materials acquired Mountain Pass in 2017, and resumed rare earth mining on US soil in early 2018.