that are unintentional consequences of human activities, these could be voluntarily influenced – on the condition that public opinion becomes aware of this and assumes the consequences of voluntarist policies in this field.
A large part of this volume, Volume 2, will be devoted to examining the leverage available to us to make the energy transition compatible with the use of our mineral resources. However, before examining them, it will also be necessary to address a number of issues related to the legal regimes governing access to mineral resources, the geopolitical interactions between producing and consuming countries and the impact of extractive activities on populations.
I.1. The stakes: between legal rules, interdependence of nations and interests of local populations
First of all, it goes without saying that the perpetuation of a growth model based on the continuous growth of raw material needs, to which will most probably be added those (perhaps one-off) of the energy transition, places resource-importing countries in a difficult situation. In this context, the multiplication of criticality studies of raw materials testifies to the growing concern of countries and companies that rely heavily on international flows of natural resources. The contribution of Emmanuel Hache and his co-authors (Chapter 1) clearly shows that these criticality studies nonetheless bias reality by displacing consumers at the mercy of all-powerful producer countries. Yet this interdependence is often mutual, and it is therefore necessary to weigh the supply risk by also analyzing the diversity of exports from producer countries. Moreover, in this giant chess game, the availability of national resources (even untouched ones), the threat of the substitution of an alternative resource or a supply route from a cooperative country can certainly reduce the risk of supply disruption even in the case of a high level of dependence. Nevertheless, the reduction of the need for resources (sobriety and material efficiency) always seems less uncertain than securing access to primary resources.
Moreover, access to mineral resources is fundamentally shaped by legal rules and regimes, as demonstrated by the contribution of Stéphanie Reich-de Vigan (Chapter 2). Important differences remain between the legal regimes in the area of territorial and extraterritorial mineral resource ownership, which are not neutral with regard to incentives to extract or protect the environment. If our socio-cultural models focus on the economic part of sustainable development, it is likely that legal regimes for resource extraction will be brought into coherence to reflect this overarching objective. This will probably be to the detriment of the environment and by accentuating anthropic pressure on the last natural areas that have been relatively spared until now (Antarctica, the seabed in international waters).
There are, however, other options highlighted by the example of New Zealand. Indeed, New Zealand is one of the emblematic countries that have exploited the extension of the border, i.e. developed by relying on an adjacent geographic region exceptionally endowed with natural resources and characterized by a low human:earth ratio balance (Barbier 2011). However, when the United States continues to legally open other borders across the board – such as the treaty legalizing the private exploitation of asteroids – New Zealand opted for a different choice in 2017. Indeed, under pressure from the Iwi (Maori), who give the Whanganui River a different cultural representation from the British, the latter has been given a legal personality, allowing it to defend its interests in legal proceedings with the help of two lawyers. One can legitimately think that this will undoubtedly modify the future extractive trajectories near the river. This is again a good example of the importance of feedback from the human sciences on the opposing pressure by humans on the biosphere and the geosphere.
Within this framework, the study of the occupation of space, settlements and territories occupied by mining activity can provide adequate information on the parameters likely to modify these trajectories. This is what Michel Deshaies is trying to do in his contribution (Chapter 3). By these means, he confirms the absence of determinism on the trajectory of this anthropogenic pressure. He also notes the growing difficulties in perpetuating the current extraction model in the face of local populations increasingly hostile to mining projects. Here again, we note that conflicts related to mining projects are essentially present in North, South and Central America, even though a significant share of extraction is also located in Africa and other OECD countries. This is evidence that social organization, institutions and culture play a significant role in maintaining or inhibiting the widespread extraction of mineral resources.
I.2. The leverage for action: what can be expected and what remains to be explored
What leverage do we have at our disposal to achieve a more sober economy and sustainable development? One of the lessons that can be drawn from the previous chapters is that the existence of strong interactions between the various constraints affecting mineral resources prevents us from considering that we could free ourselves from them by resorting to univocal, purely technical, economic or societal solutions: proposing a simple solution to a complex problem is doomed to fail. In this volume, we examine what we can potentially expect from the deployment of several forms of leverage often evoked in the literature: domestic extraction, substitution, recycling, material efficiency (or decoupling) and low-tech solutions combined with sobriety.
To begin with, the maintenance or development of national or European domestic extraction is often mentioned both by certain geopolitical experts and by strategic committees, such as COMES (Comité pour les métaux stratégiques, Committee for Strategic Metals), concerned with reducing the impact of supply disruptions. This same recommendation is also sometimes made, this time in order to preserve the environment. However, although the stated objective is environmental, this leverage is rarely formulated by environmentalists themselves. We can think in particular of Guillaume Pitron’s latest work for the general public (2018) where the author calls for higher national production to avoid a delocalization of the ecological impacts of the energy and digital transition (in his chapter “The end of the last sanctuaries”). This leverage would be both an effective way to relocate negative mining externalities while reducing them significantly (thanks to more respectful local extraction conditions), and a great support to raise consumers’ awareness of the environmental cost of their lifestyle. The author even views it as a good way to increase consumer pressure on emerging countries to change their socially and environmentally disastrous extraction techniques. He criticizes environmental NGOs for not understanding the true impact of the energy transition:
Environmental NGOs are showing a certain inconsistency as they denounce the more sustainable effects of the new world that they themselves have called for. They do not admit that the energy and digital transition is also a transition from oil fields to rare metal deposits, and that the fight against global warming calls for a mining response that must be assumed. (Pitron 2018)
While the latter argument may appear to be valid in the case of an energy transition in the form of “green growth”, the argument for a national mining revival for the reasons cited above seems to suffer from at least four pitfalls:
– First, the revival of domestic mining supply suffers from multiple problems of perception by the population and stakeholders, as Johan Yans rightly points out (Chapter 4). However, the same author suggests ways to mitigate these negative perceptions;
– Second, it seems strange from an ethical point of view to expose individuals personally to a problem with the intention of raising their awareness. In the same way that we do not dump our garbage in the gardens and apartments of our fellow citizens to make them aware of sorting, it seems doubtful that we should expose them to the nuisances of mines in order to encourage them to reduce their consumption of mineral resources;
– Third, empirical statistical analyses show that countries
