Rare Earth by Robert McDougall HD Video with Sound, 31:36, 2021 / watch the video here DIVING INTO Portrait of a place, stories of water and minerals, counter histories, the end of empire, geography and imagination, anthropocene dreams. Globalization in the late 20th century accelerated the mining activities, as global companies began competing for possession of the minerals, mostly choosing to subcontract the extraction process to China to save on costs and to avoid environmental regulations. This assured the importation to the West of bountiful rare earth metals, while similarly assuring the permanent exportation of the violent environmental damage which rare earth extraction causes. Western civilisation has always exported violence beyond its borders, with the world now divided, as Guillaume Pitron writes, “between the dirty and those who pretend to be clean”.