Extracted Frontiers: A Call from the North

Abstract

From microchips to smartphones to electric cars, humanity’s dreams of techno-salvation are built on the crude materiality of extracted metals and minerals. This extraction conveniently avoids large population centres in affluent Western democracies and instead clusters around the world’s social peripheries. This slam poem, first presented as a spoken performance at the 8th Winter School of the Estonian Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts in Tallinn, represents a call from the north – one of the largest frontiers for modern mining activities. By drawing on a few examples of past and present extractive landscapes, it aims to highlight the Arctic’s physical, environmental and social costs for our technological transcendence. New ways of understanding humanity need to be rooted in the real material costs and consequences of our new and future technologies.