ABSTRACT
Please take out your cell phone. I’m not going to ask you to turn it off so it won’t distract you from this text, although that’s probably a good idea. What I would like you to do is to take a moment to consider how this slim little device links you to the rest of the world. And I’m not just talking about its capacity to cruise the internet or call and send messages to people across the globe, although that truly is remarkable. What I’m talking about is the very construction of your device, its physical components and the process by which it was put together. For example, all cell phones these days use a category of elements called rare earth minerals, which actually aren’t all that rare at all, but they are hardly ever found in concentrated amounts that can be profi tably mined. Th e United States once produced rare earth minerals at a mine in California, but it was closed down because it produced a large amount of radioactive waste that began leaking from storage facilities (Oskin 2013). Th ough this mine has recently been reopened, right now the vast majority of rare earth minerals in our cell phones and other computers come from China, where the government has used police power to crush citizen protests over levels of environmental contamination caused by rare earth mining that would not be tolerated in the United States (Downey, Bonds, and Clark 2010).
