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Grandmother and knowledge-keeper Sherry Copenace and Dylan Miner have discussed with
me the Anishinaabemowin (Neshnabe ́mwen) expression aanikoobijigan (yankobjegen). The
expression means ancestor and descendent at the same time (Copenace, 2017; Miner, 2017).
This meaning suggests an Anishinaabe perspective on intergenerational time—a perspective
embedded in a spiraling temporality (sense of time) in which it makes sense to consider
228 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2)

ourselves as living alongside future and past relatives simultaneously as we walk through life.
Spiraling time, for me in this essay, actually refers to the varied experiences of time that we
have as participants within living narratives involving our ancestors and descendants.
Experiences of spiraling time, then, may be lived through narratives of cyclicality, reversal,
dream-like scenarios, simultaneity, counter-factuality, irregular rhythms, ironic un-cyclicality,
slipstream, parodies of linear pragmatism, eternality, among many others.4 The spiraling
narratives unfold through our interacting with, responding to and reflecting on the actual
or potential actions and viewpoints of our ancestors and descendants. They unfold as
continuous dialogues. The narratives also involve the dramas related to our own
transformations as we move from being descendants to ancestors through our own lives.

what use words
such as ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘nonhuman’’ even have for helping us address pressing issues.

future generations. They instead are looking to their lives and
wanting qualities such as a chance to have spiritual lives, to have consensual and trusting
relationships and political leadership, and the capacity to interact with nonhumans
meaningfully. These are not qualities that are tied to any one practice—whether that
practice is traditional, in some sense, or newly adopted. So our dialogue moves into issues
of how both traditional and newer practices can foster these qualities today in our current
situations.

For example, the movie Avatar is a powerful story of environmental injustice against the Na’vi people, who live under the dystopia of alien invasion from a more powerful military force.
Yet the protagonist who emerges is an alien, non-Na’vi white male who is able to pass for
Na’vi and have a sexual relationship with a Na’vi gendered female character who becomes
defined in terms of this romantic relationship. Yet, following conventions in Indigenous
science fiction, we are not in that position of being able to depend on a non-Indigenous
person. In fact, if we think counterfactually about our ancestors’ perspectives, they would
have warned us about would-be allies. In our ancestors time, they experienced how would-beallies exploited Indigenous peoples as an effort to boost their own senses of righteousness.
Consider our ancestors who experienced the supposed ‘‘friends of the Indian’’ in the 19th
century. These would-be allies saw it as their high moral obligation to support U.S. policies
and actions to liquidate Indigenous territories into private property and break up Indigenous
kinship systems.

At a 2014 colloquium in Brazil, ‘‘The Thousand Names of Gaia: From the Anthropocene
to the Age of the Earth,’’ Heather Swanson, Nils Bubandt, and Anna Tsing discuss, in a
summary reporting on the event, how many of the organizers and participants called for
greater inclusivity of perspectives (Swanson et al., 2015). In a published presentation, some of the colloquium’s organizers claim that the event ‘‘takes place at the moment when the autochthonous peoples of the Americas seem to confront what appears to be the final offensive in the war that ‘Humans’ have waged against them for five centuries’’
(Danowski et al., 2014). The organizers’ reference to ‘Humans’ refers to diverse
scholarship challenging certain concepts of the human. Sylvia Wynter, for example,
argues that ‘‘human’’ often refers to a particular ‘‘ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois)’’
that ‘‘overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,’’ and hence seeks to secure its
ethnoclass own well-being at the expense of other humans, living and nonliving beings
(plants, animals, microbiota), and collectives (Wynter, 2003: 260).
Some of the organizers, in the same essay, argue that ‘‘It is high time to make room for
the perspective of others, of other ‘we,’ of those humans who live in worlds in which ‘human’ and ‘world’ are distributed in radically different ways.’’ They commit to the ‘‘essential’’ work of ‘‘[finding] out whether ‘we ourselves’ are really capable of recognizing the absolute legitimacy of the presence of these other ‘we’s,’ i.e. the Indigenous peoples, in a discussion about the fate of a common planet’’

Another privilege concerns people more to the political left. Their ancestors gifted them worlds in which they could feel themselves to be innocent. They can be saviors of Indigenous peoples—as protagonists who can still be
heroes to Indigenous peoples precisely because there is a belief that they can do what their ancestors failed to do (see Lawrence and Dua, 2005; Tuck and Yang, 2012, on ‘‘innocence’’).
Yet, to maintain this belief, these allies must accept that their ancestral fantasies have not yet fully come to pass, leaving an opening for supposedly innocent people to help Indigenous friends whose lives remain sufficiently—but not entirely—unaffected by colonial and other forms of
domination. For example, some seem to believe that merely attending an Indigenous ceremony and mobilization, such as the #NoDAPL movement, or making social media postings, or doing
academic research as a professor, or romanticizing Indigenous wisdom, actually work to transform the levers of colonial power that maintain anti-Indigenous oppression. To believe this, one must assume that the nexus of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization is not as
entrenched as it is, which creates the illusion that performing supportive but ineffectual actions is enough to merit and justify one’s feeling innocent.

Renewable energy, while alleviating fossil fuel's extraordinary carbon emissions, does not depart from fossil fuel's fundamentally extractivist nature. Discussion around climate change too often focuses on the former while forgetting the myriad harm also caused by the latter, which renewable energy leaves mostly untouched. When this is taken into consideration, it's clear that the problem of metal supply is not about how much of a particular resource is left in the ground, but the increasing marginal costs—environmental and human—of extracting that resource. The key question about metal supply is not one of scarcity, but a political one of who bears that burden.

As demand for these metals accelerate, we are likely to see these environmental costs intensify. The logic of extractivism is that first the most profitable deposits are mined: profitable because they are easily accessible, or in high concentrations, or because their extraction can be subsidized in some way, e.g. by discounting environmental costs or by exploiting cheap labor conditions. As these deposits run dry, anxiety around near-term scarcity causes the price to go up, thereby making once uneconomical deposits financially viable to mine.

Prior to Chinese rare earth production, the US's Mountain Pass mine was responsible for 70% of global rare earth production—until, as described previously, it was shuttered due to radioactive leakages and increasing domestic environmental concern. Cheap rare earths, however, were still necessary, and the Chinese government, prioritizing economic growth, was willing to bear the environmental and health costs necessary to keep prices low.
n 2010, however, priorities changed: the Chinese government tightened rare earth export quotas by almost half, stating environmental, health, and conservation reasons. These reasons seem plausible; the rare earth industry in China has resulted in huge environmental and health impacts including contaminated water, radioactive dust, decreased crop yields, and increased rates of cancer (it's important to note that the Chinese government has long been aware of these effects; these were seen as necessary sacrifices for economic growth). In response to the tightened quotas, the US, Japan, and the EU brought complaints to the World Trade Organization claiming it was manipulative to increase domestic downstream production of rare earth based products. The WTO upheld the complaints, ruling against the quotas.

China's decision to sacrifice people for economic growth is not at all unusual—mining is frequently framed as a boon to the host country or local community, both by foreign mining companies and local governments. Latin American and African metal deposits have already been identified by the World Bank as particularly promising for a renewable energy transition and an asset for their economies.

Extractive industries do often form the financial bedrock for states. But, as Thea Riofrancos notes, this income is inevitably contingent on "violent forms of dispossession", i.e. the theft of land, displacement, and intense policing. The promised local economic benefits seldom materialize: extraction-dependent states tend to have higher proportions of their population in poverty and higher inequality. What does materialize is conflict. The Observatory for Mining Conflicts in Latin America (OCMAL) found that foreign investment in mining predicts conflicts throughout Latin America as locals resist the expansion of mining operations and their myriad impacts on health. The social and environmental effects of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea sparked a 10-year civil war that left about 20,000 dead.

When locals try to engage in small-scale mining of their own resources as a supplemental income, they are subject to these same violent dispossessions. In a gold and rare-earth rich region of the Brazilian Amazon, Cabeça do Cachorro, Indigenous land rights extend to only the top 40cm of the land—the federal government owns anything deeper. These rights are sold to mining companies, who then develop infrastructure that facilitates both private and government control over the area. Here, the discovery of rare earths serves to advance an existing agenda to "conquer the northwestern Amazonian frontier", and no doubt the increasing need to secure domestic rare earth supply will serve to further rationalize this agenda. This too echoes a common pattern: weakening protections for Indigenous territories, if not outright undermining them, for mining. As new supply needs to be secured and new mines established, this is likely to accelerate
Like China, the US is increasingly prioritizing resource extraction over communities. This is reminiscent of the US's recent energy independence with respect to oil. Fracking has considerable health, environment, and social costs, but the continued expansion of that industry demonstrates that energy security concerns and profitability supersede those costs. Indeed, the US's dominance in oil production has strengthened its geopolitical position by allowing it to gain independence from OPEC and Russia. A similar trade-off will become standard with mining, continuing established practices of relegating the harms to marginalized communities

Deep sea mining does not mitigate the human costs of mineral extraction, as it has the potential to harm ocean reliant communities. Mining explorations have already impacted Pacific Islander communities, and will likely continue disproportionately impacting them, by polluting the area and threatening fishing supply and other customary uses of the ocean. When applied to the sea, typical programs which seek to remediate the local impacts of extractivist projects may serve only to redistribute environmental health and biodiversity away to regions already safe from mining—in wealthier jurisdictions. We are already seeing this pattern emerge—more protection of deep sea resources in the Northern Hemisphere, and more prospecting of those in the Southern Hemisphere, where biodiversity is potentially the greatest. When considering terrestrial extractivist dynamics, deep sea mining is nothing new. Like all other "frontiers", the deep sea is always and already deeply integrated into ecological systems and human communities that will fall apart with increased extraction.

If both terrestrial and deep sea mining are too harmful and politically fraught, then perhaps we should look elsewhere—outside of these limits. Moving mining and other dirty industries off-world is a suggestion that has gained more attention over the past decade, which envisions space as an expanse of infinite resources and an endless trash bin (the "perfect vacuum"), sparing the Earth the continued cost of our ceaseless expansion. Certainly, several of the world's billionaires have used the space industry as an outlet for their excess capital—Eric Schmidt and Larry Page have specifically funded space mining endeavors, while others like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos invest in the required launch infrastructure. Jeff Bezos recently summarized the vision:

We send things up into space, but they are all made on Earth. Eventually it will be much cheaper and simpler to make really complicated things, like microprocessors and everything, in space and then send those highly complex manufactured objects back down to earth, so that we don’t have the big factories and pollution generating industries that make those things now on Earth...And Earth can be zoned residential.
Under the assumption of infinite material, space mining has even been described as the key prerequisite for a post-scarcity utopia. Indeed, one concern around space mining is that it would cause a sudden spike in resource supply, destabilizing the global economy. One business strategy therefore involves sequestering space-metal orbs into orbit so they can be sold slowly to maintain planetary scarcity.

The earthbound environmental impacts of space mining are largely contingent on the impacts of launch and reentry, so improvements to that process, such as renewable and zero-emission fuels, can go a long way. Minimizing transit between Earth and space would of course also improve the footprint. Production that requires the metals can also be relocated to orbit such that only finished products are brought down, for example.

Perhaps the biggest complication is a chicken-and-egg problem: the infrastructure for space industry simply doesn't exist, but the most economical development of that infrastructure requires operational space mining projects. Given that transit has the biggest cost and footprint, transporting raw ore to Earth for processing would undermine the profitability of these mining endeavors, and also contradict their environmental justifications. Establishing the processing infrastructure in space would similarly require heavy transit: launching the necessary facilities, equipment, and resources. Over time, launch costs may go down such that this problem is more tractable, but for now, even the world's richest billionaires can't afford this gambit.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty states that no nation can claim sovereignty over a celestial body, though they can use them.
In 2015, Obama signed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 into law (also known as Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship or SPACE Act), which was in part driven by lobbying from Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources. The SPACE Act recognizes private claims of US citizens over space resources and allows civil suits against entities that interfere with these rights, though without recognition from the international community it may not mean much. Legislation like this sets up space resources as a first-come-first-serve race, such that those resources become monopolized by only those countries wealthy enough to access them. Non-space-faring states—many of which were or are exploited by the space-faring ones—are shut out.
Beyond the legal and technical uncertainties lie obscene profits, estimated to reach as high as $35 billion for a single asteroid
Space mining is distant enough that we should not organize society around its possibility. Even if it were achievable, there are many ways to do it wrong—just extending social and economic problems into space—and it's not clear that there is a way to do it "right". We should be hesitant to accept any solution that requires us to wait just a little bit longer with our accelerating extractivism. Nevertheless, the possibility of space mining and industry remains key to the fantasy of endless expansion. Viewing space exploitation in this way assumes that resource scarcity and environmental impacts are the only limits to growth, and that holding out for some vague space-faring future is something we can afford to wait for. While environmental impacts are especially urgent right now, organizing society around the growth-at-all-costs imperative also relies on exploitative and extractive social relations that outer space can't fix..
Most of the issues outlined so far are concerned with primary production: mining new ("virgin") materials and introducing them into circulation. One of the consistent proposals for mitigating the impacts of primary production and securing supply is to ramp up secondary production, i.e. recycling. Unlike fossil fuels, the metals in renewable energy infrastructure can theoretically be recycled infinitely. As one paper puts it, we should "minimize the seemingly bizarre situation of spending large amounts of technology, time, energy, and money to acquire scarce metals from the mines, and then throwing them away after a single use."

Recycling is promising, and ideally it can substitute all of primary production. Recycled aluminum and nickel have about 90% less CO2 emissions than primary production; for copper the savings are 65% and for gold it can be 80% less. Energy use is also drastically reduced, by two to ten times, as is water use, by more than ten times for many metals. The waste produced is also significantly less since recycling is typically dealing with higher concentrations of the material than found in nature. Smartphones have a concentration of gold 100 times than that in gold ore. An important exception to this trend is rare earth recycling, which can be as toxic and energy intensive as primary processing, though still better overall. Across all metals, recycling is greatly preferable to primary production.

Modern technologies complicate the picture in two ways. First, the concentration of metals are much smaller and more dispersed, making them more difficult to collect and producing a lower yield per item. This disincentivizes recycling—it's just not worth the money. For example, the recycling rate for PGMs in industrial applications is between 80 and 90%. For electronics it's a mere 0 to 5%. In industrial applications, the PGMs that are used are kept on-site, so collection is relatively easy. Electronics, however, travel far and wide, requiring tremendous coordination to collect them at a recycling facility.

Climate change is so alarming precisely because of its global scale. Its effects threaten practically everyone, including the better off in the global North who are usually insulated from the consequences of their consumption. It is completely possible—maybe more likely than not—that emissions can be reduced in a way that maintains the current regime of global extractivism that localizes ecological and social harm, keeping it out of sight and mind of the wealthier of the world.

Many of the proposals for the Green New Deal are comprehensive, but still overwhelmingly domestically focused (though considerate of domestic communities often overlooked). The better ones address the issue of localizing the costs of both climate change’s effects as well as adaptation against those effects—communities disproportionately affected by pollution, fracking, and so on. But mentions of international trade are mostly limited to “green development”, emissions reduction, or otherwise refer to under-specified commitments to more environmentally-focused trade policy, and fail to offer any justice or even acknowledge that, though a renewable energy transition is unambiguously necessary, it will be at the continued expense of those who contributed the least to this ecological catastrophe. We need to consider how these strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change will intensify existing extractivist regimes and how ameliorating those systems can be included in our visions for a post-carbon future.