Join us as we welcome Julie Klinger, a candidate for the Nelson Institute’s RISE-EARTH hiring initiative.
Klinger is a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her research investigates the intersections of critical minerals supply chains, global space politics, and rural and Indigenous livelihoods.
In her talk, Klinger will discuss “Critical Mineral Supply Chains and Climate Action: What Does Land-Based Justice Look Like in the Context of the Energy-Transition Mining Boom?”
Can’t attend in person? Join this seminar on Zoom
Abstract
Addressing the climate emergency requires transitioning to renewable energy generation as quickly as possible. But renewable energy technology relies on hardware comprised of minerals, metals, and materials wrested from the Earth by extractive supply chains that feed many different applications and generate (extra)planetary effluent flows, all of which too often undermine environmental, climate, and justice priorities.
Drawing on long-term, collaborative, and multidisciplinary research on four continents, this talk presents several approaches to a wicked problem: if mining is essential to provision the energy transition, how to account for, mitigate, and remediate the site-specific, regional, and global consequences of mining-driven land use change? It explores land-based justice in diverse contexts often characterized as frontiers for critical mineral supply chains:
- Indigenous and agrarian socionatures, specifically those landscapes and livelihoods whose productive functions are not primarily defined by non-local commodity markets
- So-called “extreme frontiers,” such as tropical forest basins (Amazon and the Congo), the Arctic, the deep seabed, and outer space
- The frontier’s temporal and ideological counterpart: industrial sites, dumps, and other so-called wastelands that are devalued, invisibilized, informalized, and abandoned.