🎧 Listen: In today's example of The Journal podcast, kimmackrael discusses the fight over Europe's rare-earth minerals, which could be a blessing for the West but puts hundreds of years of tradition in peril for Sweden’s indigenous Sami people
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Kim McGrail: It's about 5:40. It's pitch black here and has been very dark for several hours actually, because the sun here only is up for a couple of hours. When I walk, I can hear the snow sort of squeaking beneath my boots. The ground everywhere here is covered in snow. Kim McGrail: They're about a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, so they're far up there. It's farther north than I've been before. I'm from Canada. I'm from a city where I'm used to getting a lot of snow and cold weather in the winter, but being in the Arctic is a totally different experience.
Kim McGrail: They're getting closer and closer, and it's causing the structure of the ground above the mine to shift. Kim McGrail: One of the big buildings that they have to figure out how to move next is this historic wooden church that I actually visited, that's in the old part of the town. It was once voted, I think it was the most beautiful building in Sweden. That's another one they have to figure out how to dismantle it, how to bring it to the new part of town.Kim McGrail: Right. Yeah, for sure.
Kim McGrail: With apologies to anyone who studied chemistry and will know something about this, I'm going to grab a periodic table. Here we go. They start with lanthanum, to lutetium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium. Kim McGrail: Right. Yeah, is a lot. The company at least says that that's an amount that should be enough to supply a lot of the need that Europe's going to have going forward. The hope with looking at this deposit and potential mine is that it could be a supply for Europe, a European supply of rare earth minerals for the West, a supply that comes from somewhere that's not China.
Ryan Knutson: They brought her to a spot overlooking Kiruna's mining activity. She could see dark plumes billowing between two hills.Carin: That used to be a mountain. Tomas: Right here where we're standing, this was the old migration route, which we took going east every year for as long as people can remember; many, many, many hundred, many millennia before Kiruna as a town actually came to be. But then during the '50s, it got shut down because of the mine and because of the city. My family last used this migrational route in 1948.Tomas: Then, of course, we got pushed outside.
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