GLOBAL LOCATIONS
A Transnational Problem
Southern Greenland
Narsaq, a small village in South Greenland, is the political epicenter of Greenland’s mineral resource future. The controversial Kvanefjeld rare earth project has remained a potent political debate for over a decade, dominating resource extraction discourse in and about this majority-indigenous Arctic nation. In many ways, Narsaq has become a microcosm of the global indigenous struggle against the proliferation of green extractivism.
Southern California
Southern Inland California has become an essential yet hidden node in the distribution and logistical operations of American internet retail companies. Super-powered by AI, algorithmic management, and network computing, distribution centers – like Amazon warehouses – are essential stopping points for global goods purchased and sold on the internet. But these massive structures have a heavy environmental cost – from changing land use distributions to toxic air pollution from millions of diesel trucks ferrying internet goods to and from these sites.
Northern Virginia
Since the late 1960s and early foundations of the Internet, Northern Virginia has been the epicentre of digital infrastructure in North America. Today, Northern Virginia is referred to as the “heart of the internet” due to its dense internet traffic and because it is home to the largest data center market in the world. Data centers are intense consumers of land, water, energy, and they also produce millions of tonnes of e-waste every year.
Taiwan
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) currently manufactures around 62% of the world’s semiconductors. While there are important historical events in Taiwan’s development into an industry player with threads connecting it to Silicon Valley history, the manufacturing impacts of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry are felt much more in the here and now. This water-and-petrochemical-intensive industry is also entangled in geopolitical battles over sovereignty, supply chains, and access to the most valuable component of modern computing: the computer chip.
Silicon Valley
Semiconductors (also known as computer “chips”) are the foundation of digital computing. While there’s very little remaining manufacture in the area known as “Silicon Valley”, the health effects from semiconductor fabrication cleanup sites persist. To this day, there are 23 Superfund sites in northern California, most of them due to chip fabs contaminating groundwater aquifers with toxic petrochemical solvents used in the fabrication process. And yet, this environmental legacy remains at best a footnote of both local and industry history.
Zimbabwe
Despite international treaties banning the transborder movement of e-waste, research shows that the majority of the world’s e-waste is exported from the Global North to the Global South, leaving a legacy of ecological and epidemiological disaster as these countries struggle to handle the e-waste burden. Developing countries, like Zimbabwe, depend on the informal sector to collect, sort and recycle e-waste, however, the use of inefficient processes limits the economic value of e-waste and the use of rudimentary tools results in adverse effects on the environment and human health.