Julie Michelle Klinger

It’s not because we don’t know how to properly manage the waste, but more because it’s really expensive, so people tend to cut corners where they can... The larger point is that we know how to do better.

Klinger is the author of Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (2017) which traces the history and use of rare earth elements from the 1880s to the present. Rare Earth Frontiers won the 2017 Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography given by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) for making an “unusually important contribution to advancing the science and art of geography.”

Klinger received the 2017 Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography from the American Association of Geographers for her work Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. In this book, she examines the production and consumption of the so-called rare-earth elements. Contrary to the name, accessible deposits of these minerals occur around the world, but they are difficult to extract and purify. Processing produces large amounts of radioactive and toxic chemical waste.

In 2015, Klinger accepted a position at Boston University. She is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Klinger also serves as one of the associate directors of the Land Use and Livelihoods Initiative (LULI) at the university's Global Development Policy Center (GDP Center).

Julie Michelle Klinger graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in 2006. While at Sarah Lawrence, she worked with Joshua Muldavin. In addition, she earned a certificate from the Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2007. She earned her PhD in geography at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015, with the dissertation On the Rare Earth Frontier. Her advisor was Michael J. Watts.

Julie Michelle Klinger (born 1983, Rockford, Illinois) is a geographer at the University of Delaware.

Klinger traces the history of rare earth elements, 17 elements which are important to a wide variety of technologies including electronics, telecommunications, medicine, green energy (solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles), and defensive systems. She traces connections between geology, mining, corporations, political and military power structures, and communities from the 1880s to the present, around the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Mountain Pass Mine in southern California was the major source of rare earth elements in the world. Beginning in the 1990s, the Chinese government emphasized policies that led to its dominance in the world market for rare earths, and to severe environmental and human damage in the "sacrifice zone" of Baotou in Inner Mongolia.