Category Archives: Book Review

War on the Environment: Donovan Webster’s “Aftermath”

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Aftermath: The Remnants of War. Random House, 1998

“The soldiers moved on. The war moved on. The bombs stayed.”

-Donovan Webster, Aftermath

In July 2015, seven farms in Northern France were quietly ordered to destroy their entire harvest without selling it. The cause, they were told, was contamination from heavy metals and toxic compounds in the soil. Farmers lost hundreds of thousands of Euros of milk, grain, and meat. The contamination came from nearly a ton of unexploded World War I ammunition that had remained dormant under the soil for nearly a century. After reading Donovan Webster’s Aftermath (Random House, 1996), these farmers may strike you as the lucky ones. After all, the bombs that destroyed their crops were discovered and safely disposed of. If a plough blade had so much as grazed the firing mechanism on one of these bombs, the headlines would have told a very different story.

In Aftermath, Webster provides a war story unlike any other. Even twenty years after its publication, it provides a critical understanding of the consequences of 20th century armed conflict. Unexploded ordnance and contamination from chemical weapons will remain long after the wars themselves are forgotten. In Aftermath, Webster presents a series of compelling narratives from France, Russia, Vietnam, Iraq, and the United States that all tell a single story: War is hell. And that hell doesn’t just end once the treaty is signed.

After over fifty years, the démineurs (literally, “de-miners”) who remove explosives from French forests are still hard at work. The statistics can be terrifying; the Départment du Déminage in France alone destroys 900 tons of discovered munitions annually. Some of the largest ordnance has yet to work its way back to the surface; when a thousand-pound shell from a World War I German Paris Gun was fired, it would crash back into the earth at twice the speed of sound. The Départment estimates that even after a century many shells are likely still 60 feet underground. The smaller munitions are actually even more dangerous; a mechanical sugar beet harvester will pick up grenades as easily as beets, with deadly results for the farmers operating the machinery. One démineur Webster encounters expresses the difficulty of the situation. “I doubt we’ll ever clear these forests completely,” he says. “We haven’t even gotten to the big shells yet. They’re still deep in the ground…any dreams France has of farming this land in the next century, they are just that: dreams.”

Aftermath doesn’t delve deeply into the science of radioactivity, or the studies on the lasting effects of compounds like the defoliant Agent Orange. It focuses instead on the consequences of using these weapons, and on understanding what happens after the military packs up and moves on. Though Webster arrives in Vietnam a generation after the U.S military stopped using Agent Orange in the country, he find thousands of children born with severe birth defects simply because their mothers were exposed to the chemical. The book can be difficult to read; Webster doesn’t shy away from descriptions of the horrors of war, and deaths by gas, shell, mine and artillery are a constant presence.

In the United States, Donovan focuses on the controversies that surround stockpiling and testing weapons. He concludes by warning of the risks surrounding the then-imminent activation of an incinerator at Tooele Army Depot, where the depot’s stockpile of chemical weapons would be destroyed. Critics argued that if the incinerator’s safety measures should fail, flaws in its design could unleash chemical weapons on the surrounding area. Webster’s dire warnings are undercut by the lack of historical evidence; the incinerator shut down in 2013 after over fifteen years of successful operation. The book warns of the death and destruction an incinerator malfunction would cause, but these warnings lack the gravity they would have had in 1996.

What never changes is the understanding that the actual war is only the beginning of the problem. In France, Russia, Vietnam, and the United States, the full consequences of war have taken a century to reveal themselves. Though not all Webster’s predictions for the future were on target, the concerns he raises remain urgent. The problems of France today are the problems of Syria a generation from now. In that light, Aftermath remains a crucial part of our awareness of the consequences of war, and it remains relevant even twenty years after publication.

Black, White, and Green: Personal Transformation and Courageous Imperfection at the Farmers Market

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A group of white customers sit on a patch of grass in front of farmers' market tents, with a black women walking in the foreground

On a sunny Saturday morning, sociologist and alternative food enthusiast Alison Hope Alkon hopped a train to West Oakland, California to begin a study on farmers’ markets in low-income communities of color. To Alkon, farmers’ markets represented an important tool in the pursuit of more sustainable food systems – but one she could not fully understand without reaching outside her native scene of predominantly White, and often middle class, environmental spaces. She would have no trouble fitting in with the crowd at the stereotypically “alternative” North Berkeley Farmers’ Market – but West Oakland, where 37% of residents live below the poverty rate and a mere 5% are White, was another story. Trying not to think about the fate of her academic career if this plan fell through, Alkon approached the manager of the West Oakland Farmers’ Market to ask for the market’s cooperation. Even her wealth of experiences with student cooperatives and organic farming could not have fully prepared Alkon for his response: “What are we going to get out of it?”

A street with a few streetlamps, a graffiti wall, and a railroad crossing sign in West Oakland

An intersection in West Oakland, where Alkon conducted much of her research; image courtesy Wikimedia commons

North Berkeley produce is priced at luxury levels, while the West Oakland Farmers Market traces its philosophical roots to the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program of the 1960s and 70s. Yet despite these differences, both markets are living examples of a green economy, inviting customers to change the world by changing what they buy. This paradox – starkly different circumstances, but deeply shared goals – is at the heart of Alkon’s 2012 book, Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy. The book is as much a record of Alkon’s personal journey trying to situate herself within academia and environmentalism as it is a comparison between the two farmers’ markets.

Through the histories of each market, Alkon traces a common shift from an anti-capitalist framework to one that prioritizes creating a green economy within capitalist structures. Historically, White counterculture and national movements for Black liberation have shared certain touchstones for environmental and social justice. This common rhetoric is often built on critiques of capitalism as exploitative, violent, and precarious in the long term, but Alkon highlights a new, more flexible perspective emerging in both farmers’ markets. Many participants view business as key to environmental and social good, rather than identifying it as a root evil; in many ways, capitalism is the very medium of their activism. It would be a mistake, Alkon posits, to confuse present-day farmers’ markets with their ideological predecessors. These contemporary ventures build on previous social movements, to be sure, but present a more transitional worldview that is in many ways more palatable to the broader public. Her argument offers a refreshing realism, but many of the big-picture implications she alludes to are drowned out by the details of her place-specific comparison. At times, her argument feels like a sentence unfinished.

Still, Black, White, and Green treads on rare and important ground, offering careful analysis of practices and beliefs that are otherwise taken for granted. Alkon, a veteran food activist, turned her attention to questions of race and environment after spending years in a predominantly White sustainable food scene. She tracks the evolution of her questions and methods, pinpointing her realization that any study she conducted around people of color’s participation in local, organic food systems would be incomplete without also examining the movement that shaped her own life. Alkon attempts to explain and contextualize the West Oakland communities’ use of farmers markets, including its celebration of Black heritage holidays and the ubiquity of collards and natural hair products. She also brings this analysis to her own community, considering everything from environmental imagery to the unwritten uniform of long hair and Birkenstocks. To this end, Alkon’s work sheds as much light on the origins of Berkeley’s iconic counterculture as it does on the perennial significance of food within the Black freedom struggle.

With vivid prose that speaks to the sensory experience of each farmers market, Alkon brings her (admittedly complex) queries to life. Each locale has its own cast of characters, whose distinct personalities reveal – but never flatten – the messy sociological landscape Alkon strives to interpret. Readers not only get a humanizing glimpse into the people who create these spaces, but into Alkon, as well: as she “makes the familiar strange,” she casts an inquisitive eye on herself, interrogating her role as a researcher and activist. Perhaps the most important piece of Black, White, and Green is the thread of Alkon’s internal struggle that winds its way through each chapter, and the humility with which she revisits her work, four years later, in the epilogue.

On the surface, Alkon writes about the way local food systems have been raced, classed, and gendered, but she does not forget that she, too, is being shaped by these identities. Alkon’s experiences as a white woman heavily affects how she interacts with these people and spaces, which in turn dictates the data she collects, as much as it does her analysis. As she observes in the epilogue, “the building of relationships is inextricable from the gathering of data.” The book ends not with solutions, but a reflection on Alkon’s own contribution, which she openly admits feels inadequate to her now. Yet this lack of resolution is perhaps Alkon’s greatest gift to readers: through her ambivalence, she reminds us that the pursuit of just sustainability is a process of constant adaptation and courageous imperfection.

What Can Curitiba Teach Us?

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Curitiba's Bus system
Curitiba's Bus system

Curitiba’s Bus system with the elimination of private cars. Source: MBARQ Brasil | WRI Brasil Cidades Sustentáv (Flickr.com)

What if every time you properly disposed your waste, you got chocolate? In the city of Curitiba, Brazil, families who do not have access to a trash collection system can bring their waste to a neighborhood center in exchange for goods: bus tickets, food, school supplied, and even chocolate. This “Garbage That’s Not Garbage” program was so successful that 70% of the city’s trash was recycled by its residents. Curitiba’s success story is shared in Voula B. Mega’s book, Sustainable Cities for the Third Millennium: The Odyssey of Urban Excellence. In this book, Mega shares her expertise on European and global sustainable development policies and programs, which are gathered from her 15 years of service at the European Commission.

The book jumps from Copenhagen to Tokyo to Curitiba to highlight sustainable urban practices in cities all around the world. The case studies are united by a key principle: they incorporate cultural, environmental, and economic dimensions. Mega argues that strategies with two or more of those dimensions have lasting impact.

Mega advocates strongly for such mutually beneficial programs: “By analogy to the biological concentration of species in a mutually supportive environment, humans come together in places that optimize their reciprocal benefits.” Cities are intended to enact transformative change by maximizing the potential for synergies through partnerships. This is what Curitiba has done. The money from the recycled materials allowed the city to hire the homeless and recovering alcoholics for the waste separation plant. These efforts led to cleaner waterways and streets, as well as improved the local health.   The synergy between the waste plant and residents encourages partners to cooperate, instead of oppose.

By analogy to the biological concentration of species in a mutually supportive environment, humans come together in places that optimize their reciprocal benefits.

Curitiba’s waste program is also successful because it collaborated with  another city department. The Curitiba waste system also supports public transportation by trading waste and bus tickets. . Curitiba’s bus system is in fact praised for its efficiency. It is designed so well that 85% of the population uses public transportation. It does this with a bus system designed to function as a metro system. The long buses can fit 270 passengers, equipped with disability access, and travel on lanes solely dedicated for buses. Mega uses Curitiba to argue that the second major aspect of a transformative policy is mobility. Mobility is core to a city, and increasing convenient, affordable, and reliable transportation will benefit environmental and human health.

Curitiba further improved its mobility by eliminating private cars in the city center which enriched the city’s heart, and enhanced the ability of its public bus system to conveniently bring people to and from the center. This policy led to uncongested roads, air pollution reduction, and cultural pride. This pride translated into an annual tradition where children paint the paving stones on the road to mark the day when private cars were banned. This pride enhances the sense of community which increases the longevity of the change. Hence, the third lesson is innovation and celebration through people and the arts. Mega argues innovation come from people and their hope, which is the catalyst for change.

It is clear Mega’s knowledge is rich and vast. There are a few things she could change in her book. The misleading chapter titles along with the overwhelming number of case studies leaves the reader confused and disheartened. Every other paragraph in the book is a case study; hence, the full story of each city is dispersed throughout the book. The reader must navigate through the book to extract their own coherent case.

Sustainable Cities for the Third Millennium is a good resource for readers investigating current urban sustainability policies, however, they must know what they want going in. The abundant case studies  distracts the reader from Mega’s arguments, however, that does not undermine Mega’s vision. Through her countless examples, Mega informs us that we can have the best of all worlds. Cities for humans and cities for nature are not mutually exclusive; rather, they need to come together to design better environments.

 

 

James Spotila’s Window Into the Untold Stories of Sea Turtles

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A cover of Spotila's book

By Shivani Kuckreja

Over the course of the last few decades, sea turtle populations have been decreasing rapidly. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of loggerhead turtle nests on Florida’s beaches decreased by 50%. Furthermore, in Indonesia’s Bird’s Head Peninsula, the number of leatherback turtle nests decreased by 78% between 1984 and 2011. Today, it is thought that one out of every one thousand sea turtles progresses to adulthood. Around the world, these creatures are seen less and less often, due to human interference, climate change, and commercial overfishing. But James R. Spotila is aiming to reverse this trend.

A graduate of the University of Dayton, Ohio, Spotila currently holds the L. Drew Betz Chair Professor of Environmental Science Drexel University and leads Drexel’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. With over one hundred articles published in leading biology, ecology, and physiology journals, Spotila’s knowledge of sea turtles around the world is broad and deep. In 2004, he authored award-winning book Sea Turtles: A Complete Guide to Their Biology, Behavior, and Conservation. Seven years later, Spotila published a second book, titled Saving Sea Turtles: Extraordinary Stories from the Battle against Extinction.

With Spotila’s background grounded in the extensive knowledge of sea turtles and with his choice of book title, I expected Spotila’s Saving Sea Turtles: Extraordinary Stories from the Battle against Extinction to provide an engaging focus on a few detailed narratives of certain species of sea turtles.

In contrast to my expectations, Spotila provides a breadth of stories that offer glimpses into the lives of sea turtles without developing narratives fully enough to spark my empathy. While the topics of the narratives flow from one to the next, the narratives themselves seem to cut off to give way to a peek into a related topic far too soon. Within two pages, a narrative on turtle eggs and Viagra cuts off to lead way to an introduction to sea turtle nesting habits. Similarly, passages about the juvenile years of a sea turtle in the middle of the ocean are quickly followed by a new section of the book detailing the species’ eating habits. Especially with a book so broadly about sea turtles, (rather than focusing on one or two types of sea turtles), I felt as if I was still processing the very general information laid out in one narrative as I was being urged to move onto the next. While narratives can be powerful tools used to foster empathy and engage audiences, Spotila’s focus on a breadth of narratives rather than the depth of them leads to more overcharged passages than it does to clarity, and detracts from the self-reflection that should take place among readers when interacting with someone else’s stories.

In fact, what Spotila describes as a book that “contains facts and stories that will provide information and hope so that people today will…keep the dream alive of oceans full of sea turtles…” (x) seems to align more with a metanalysis of journal articles than it does with other books. Each narrative contains heavily condensed details of long-term studies conducted around the world throughout many different time periods. Over the course of the book, Spotila refers to studies on O2 and CO2 conducted in Florida and Costa Rica in the 1990s and 2000s, books on sea turtle juveniles written in the 1960s, and research on shrimp trawling in the 1970s, to name a few cited studies. Tackling such a wide range of topics during varying time periods, Spotila continues to struggle to weave engaging narratives throughout the book. Though I found the studies cited new and interesting, particularly those relating to the migration patterns of sea turtles, these studies overshadow the larger implications and complexities of the causes of and solutions to the sea turtle decline.

Overall, I felt Spotila could have better focused his time on suggesting solutions to ameliorate the decline of sea turtles worldwide. The last two pages of the book captured my attention the most and left me asking for more information, but the journey to those concluding pages felt as long as the average leatherback sea turtle migration.

Within the last two pages, Spotila hastily synthesized the complex relationships between the groups of people that rely on sea turtles to make a living, and gave readers some suggestions as to how we can play our part “in this unfinished play” (205). As a reader, this is the part I cared most about. Unfortunately, the conclusion of the book left me with more questions than answers, and while one may find this a positive reaction- a drive to learn more- I found it frustrating.

How can we address the growth of the human population without further declining the sea turtle population? In which ways can we change social norms to better protect sea turtles? Which economic tools (i.e. tax, subsidies) could the government use to help ensure that there is less illegal activity surrounding turtle egg poaching? How can we address the fact that “the developers have the will to develop, the commercial fisheries have the will to take all they can, and the poachers have the will to harvest all the eggs they can carry”? (204).

While I was hoping to finish Spotila’s book feeling motivated and driven to save sea turtles, I am left trying to deduce the endings of unfinished stories in order to better understand how I can help sea turtles survive and thrive in the future.

Hanging By a Thread

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The Uplifting Story of One Village’s Attempt to Survive Decades of Corporate Greed and a Changing Climate

Kivalina villagers are determined to fight climate injustice Photo courtesy of Flickr

Kivalina villagers are determined to fight climate injustice
Photo courtesy of Flickr

 

In February 2008, the Native Alaska community of Kivalina that has been desperately seeking to relocate due to severe flooding and erosion, sued 24 of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. In its legal claim, the tiny, remote village accused fossil fuel heavyweights such as Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell not only for creating a public nuisance by emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases, but also for deliberately misleading the public in creating a false scientific debate about climate change. While calling attention to the village’s precarious situation, the lawsuit also sought to hold corporate officials responsible for decades of corruption, manipulation and deception in blocking government action on climate change.

In her book, Kivalina: A Climate Change Story, Christine Scherer focuses on the plight of of the village and its uphill battle against the seemingly impenetrable power of the fossil fuel industry. A postdoctoral scholar in science, technology and society studies at the University of Santa Barbara, Scherer’s academic background helps her frame the story of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil et. al as a socio-environmental version of David v. Goliath, the classic tale of the underdog going up against its powerful adversary. In her contemporary adaptation, Scherer plays up Kivalina’s dramatic attempt to fight back against the giant fossil fuel companies, using her personal visit and interviews as evidence of the village’s inspiring resolve. Kivalina’s lawsuit represented an all-out effort to win damages (up to $400 million) to cover the cost of the village’s relocation. As Scherer attests, Kivalina’s persistent environmental vulnerability, political hardship and ultimately, its willingness to fight back inspires the underdog in us all against even the most powerful and well-financed adversaries.

Drawing upon conversations with Kivalina’s residents and lawyers, Scherer also traces the history of Kivalina’s precarious position from its early settlement to its present-day vulnerabilities as a coastal village on the tip of a thin, eight-mile long barrier reef island. In doing so, she weaves in the pained history of nomadic Alaska natives whom the U.S. federal government wanted to become “civilized.” After granting Alaska Natives citizenship in 1924, the U.S. government subsequently ordered them to permanently settle around schools and churches. Such was the case for the Inupiat people who used what is now Kivalina as hunting grounds during specific times of the year. According to Scherer, U.S. officials offered the Inupiat people a choice: become civilized and thus permanently settle on the small island, or face imprisonment. In presenting this tumultuous political history, Scherer thus articulates how the original political injustice of the Inupiat inevitably transitioned into an environmental one.

Contrary to the book’s title, Scherer goes well beyond the story of Kivalina and the depths of the climate change debate. She devotes a significant portion of the book to the complex, and often infuriating history of corporate influence in politics and public life. To this end, Scherer calls this the “product defense industry” (PDI), a coalition of firms, lawyers, think tanks and sophisticated organizations that “go beyond traditional PR duties” to undertake the shaping of scientific research, government regulation, and legal opinion. Citing well-researched evidence that link government and court documents to infiltration by the tobacco, asbestos and lead industries Scherer writes that the coalition’s goal was and has been “to delay and avoid government regulation, regardless of the costs to the public.” Within this context, the corporate model of concentrated power and wealth of the tobacco, asbestos and lead industries shares many parallels to that of the fossil fuel industry in influencing government energy and climate policy.

Although Scherer’s well-researched insights effectively builds up the history of corporate influence in government-funded science and public policy, she waits until the very end of the book to discuss the nature of the lawsuit and Kivalina’s corresponding struggles to win its case. In 2009, a District Court judge dismissed the case, ruling that issue was a matter for the political branches, not the courts and that Kivalina did not have legal standing to bring the case up in the first place. While Scherer touches on the fossil fuel industry’s tight grip on political and judicial matters, she fails to explicitly outline the reasons for this lawsuit’s failure. Furthermore, by publishing the book in 2011, Scherer leaves the reader wondering about the ultimate outcome of the lawsuit (it was appealed and then dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013) as well as the rest of the residents of Kivalina.

Despite these setbacks, Kivalina: A Climate Change Story helps bring mainstream attention to the larger and increasingly prominent climate justice movement. It also explains that for some communities, climate change is hard-hitting reminder of the underlying socioeconomic and political missteps in U.S policy. Finally, in going well-beyond the borders of Alaska, Scherer masterfully articulates the how the issue of global climate change is as much as a social and racial justice issue as it is an environmental one. In sharing this tragic story, the book therefore invites the reader to join the global climate justice movement not only to protect the most vulnerable but also the foundation of American democracy.

A Toolkit for Transition: A Review of Take Back the Economy

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In one of the cities most impacted by the decline of the United States’ economy, change is happening. Cleveland, Ohio used to be one of the epicenters of America’s industrial heartland– now it is serving as a model for how a city can recover from economic decline and urban decay. This model for change, known as “The Cleveland Model“, is centered within the Evergreen Cooperatives– a group of worker-owned cooperatives that are commited to building sustainable and democratic workplaces that benefit their communities.

Specifically, the Evergreen Cooperatives target the needs of Cleveland’s most dependable institutions, such as hospitals and universities, to ensure that jobs will stay in the city. Currently, Evergreen Cooperatives consists of a solar installation and weatherization program, an industrial-scale laundry service commited to a low environmental impact, and the largest urban food-producing greenhouse in the United States. Not only are these cooperatives owned by the workers themselves, but each is committed to employing those who live in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the city, where poverty rates can reach 30 percent.

A diagram depicted the exchange of resources in the Cleveland Model.

A visualization of the Cleveland Model via community-wealth.org

The Cleveland Model demonstrates how a community can ethically and sustainably redevelop, but how do other communities follow suit? In their book, Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide to Transforming our Communities, a team of geographers shows how people around the world are building such resilient community economies. Although the authors J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy are all geographers with specialties ranging from feminism to the environment, the book is not a scholarly review. Rather, Take Back the Economy tells the stories of successful and inspiring projects while also providing tools and resources to help guide readers to make change themselves. In that way, Take Back the Economy is more than a book– it is a toolkit that can be used by activists, leaders, students, and academics alike.

The book explores how communities can make change happen in five different sectors of our community economies: work, business, markets, property, and finance. Each of these sectors is reframed to take into account our ethical responsibility to one another and our natural world. This approach helps us to see that places like Cleveland can serve as a compelling model for rethinking both work and business. Far beyond Cleveland, the book provides countless examples of groups of people who are making change happen in each of the five sectors of our community economies.

For instance, Take Back the Economy reframes work as a means to surviving well, which can benefit our material, social, community, and physical well-being. With the Cleveland Model, the cooperative-style of business gives marginalized workers a means to improve their material well-being, build stronger interpersonal relationships, and give back to their communities.”Evergreen has changed my life. It enabled me to be a contributer, not only to the community, but to society as well,” stated one worker. With the Cleveland Model, work is not just a means to make income, but it is also a way to increase personal well-being.

Take Back the Economy additionally provides tools that help us to rethink the different sectors of our community economies. In the case of business, the book provides an exercise called the “People’s Account” which breaks down business models to see how much revenue workers generate versus how much they actually get paid. In a typical corporation, minimum-wage earning workers only receive a small fraction of the profits they generate from working, leading to surplus profits that don’t always benefit the workers. While some surplus may be used to sustain the business, a lot is left to accumulate in the pockets of CEOs. Even so, CEOs can pack up and leave a community when a business model in another part of the world becomes more profitable, making these business models even less sustainable.

However, in cooperatives like those used in the Cleveland Model, workers collectively determine their wages so that they earn a reasonable income for the value of their work. At the same time, the cooperatives can generate collective wealth that can be invested back in their business and in their community. Especially important to Cleveland, the businesses are owned by members of the community, meaning the businesses are more likely to remain invested in the city, creating long-term and reliable jobs. As one worker in Cleveland noted, “I am an owner, not just a worker. I help to make decisions within the community.”

Take Back the Economy goes even further to explore redevelopment strategies ranging from alternative currencies to communal ownership of land. No matter the topic, the stories, tools, and frameworks provided by the book are both accessible and empowering to the reader. While considerable engagement, organizing, and work is needed to transform our communities, the ideas and examples in Take Back the Economy can serve as a starting place. With many communities already paving the way, more can work together to a build a more ethical and sustainable world.

When Trains Fly: The Difficulties of Accessing Earth’s Rarest Metals

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A Shanghai maglev train, levitating several millimeters above the rails, thanks to the magnetic metal neodymium.

Imagine a magnet so powerful that it can make trains levitate. This miraculous metal is not fictional – it is called neodymium, and it is one of the most powerful and widely used magnets in the world. Unlike most metals, neodymium permanently retains its magnetic qualities over time. This makes it invaluable for high-tech applications, including computer hard drives, speakers, headphones, microphones, and the engines inside electric cars and wind turbines. However, despite the dependence of modern technologies on neodymium, the ability of the United States to access this essential resource is increasingly under threat.

In his 2015 popular science book, Rare: the high-stakes race to satisfy our need for the scarcest metals on earth, PhD chemist Keith Veronese explores the scarcity of earth’s rarest metals, including a special group known as rare earth elements (REE). The seventeen REEs, including train-levitating neodymium, possess similar magnetic and electrical properties. REEs are considered scarce for several reasons. First, they naturally occur in such small quantities that they would require an impossibly large amount of energy – and money – to extract. As such, one of the only sources of REEs is concentrated mineral deposits, where REEs have collected over time.

The location of neodymium and other REE deposits, however, depends upon geological forces tied to the very formation of earth’s continents. Over 1000 million years ago, the planet’s only landmass was a singular super-continent known as Nuna. When Nuna fragmented into several smaller continents, that awoke thermal vents deep within the earth that, much like a volcano, spewed magma-heated water to the planet’s surface. In this process, neodymium and other REEs near the interior of the earth were transported via water to more accessible regions of the planet’s crust. In this way, over 400 million years, miniscule amounts of REEs concentrated in large mineral deposits.

The location of ancient thermal vents, and by extension neodymium deposits, has significant implications for resource availability. Unfortunately, many ancient thermal vents were concentrated in certain regions. For example, China possesses the greatest number of REE and neodymium mineral deposits (one in three globally), while Japan lacks REE deposits of any kind. The natural, inequitable distribution of REE deposits provides China with a competitive edge in the REE and neodymium market.

As such, resource scarcity is also impacted by sociopolitical factors. In the case of REEs, China controlled as much as 96% of the market in 2011. This near monopoly was no accident – as late as the 1980s, the United States remained the primary producer of REEs. By the mid-1970s, however, China’s newly elected chairman Deng Xiaoping facilitated the country’s incredible economic growth via market reform. As part of this growth, Deng artificially lowered the price of Chinese REEs, so much so that within two decades, REE mining in other countries collapsed, unable to compete with China’s competitive prices.

China’s monopoly holds implications for artificially induced resource scarcity. In 2011, China created a minor international crisis by reducing its REE exports by 40%. Within one year, the cost of neodymium jumped by more than six times. While neodymium prices dropped in subsequent years, and China lifted the export ban in 2015, another REE embargo could greatly cripple the ability of the United States to access resources necessary for every aspect of modern life.

In response to the 2011 embargo, western nations including Australia and the United States began to re-open their abandoned REE mines. In consequence, by 2015, China’s control of the REE market had dropped to 86%. While these statistics are encouraging, U.S REE self-sufficiency is virtually impossible. Geologically, half of the seventeen REEs are not found in the United States at all. In the case of neodymium, which is found within U.S. borders, the time needed to repurpose old mines to adhere to present day environmental standards would take years, as well as billions of dollars.

What does neodymium scarcity mean for magnetic levitation (maglev) trains? Unfortunately, the magnetic fields produced by neodymium have no substitutes; without this REE, maglev trains are impossible. That being said, neodymium has great potential to revolutionize the transportation industry.  Neodymium greatly increases the speed of the trains– using magnetic propulsion, the train can travel at over 370 miles per hour. In perspective, a six-hour drive between Los Angeles and San Francisco could be reduced to an hour and 15 minute trip on a Maglev train. While still commercially unviable due to the high cost of building magnetic rail tracks, maglev trains present a potential avenue for quick and efficient travel that has already been adopted (to a limited extent) in Germany, China, and Japan.

Even though neodymium deposits exist, however, U.S. maglev trains cannot be built without Chinese cooperation. Veronese’s Rare aptly demonstrates that resource scarcity is not only a product of geological rarity, but also a matter of trade disputes and international relations. Maintaining international alliances may be just as important as mining U.S. neodymium deposits themselves.